"No Man's Sky" has been said to be massive beyond comprehension. But Sean Murray of Hello Games recently explained, with math, exactly how big. It would take a player 5 billion years to visit every planet in the game, for one second.  It may not be infinite, but as far as any human is concerned, it may as well be. To put that number in perspective the sun only has 4.6 billion years of fuel left before it burns out. (which begs the question would suns burn out in the game, making it impossible to see all the planets, becasue the suns have exploded before you could get to them)

If you explore one new planet every second of every day, you might see a repetition after 4,000 years or so.

That figure was shared with IGN by Hello's Sean Murray. It's an extraordinarily long time, but what makes it more impressive is the fact that it's merely how long it would take to visit each planet for a single second.

This is made possible because Hello opted to use 64-bit numbers to generate its worlds, rather than 32-bit numbers. When 32-bit numbers were being used at one point, it still would have meant taking several thousand years to visit each planet for one second. By moving to 64-bit numbers--which can store the astronomical sum of 2^64 total values, substantially more than the 2^32 total of 32-bit numbers. 

You can expect to hear more about the game before long, as Murray teased that Hello "will have something big to show soon."

Although we didn't see anything new from No Man's Sky at Gamescom, Sean did leave us with a little tease, saying "we will have something big to show soo

"No Man's Sky" will be a timed exclusive for the PlayStation 4 in 2015 before jumping to the PC. No confirmation yet for an Xbox One release. It's safe to say that this is my most anticipated game of the new console generation.

Watch this video with IGN interviewing Sean Murray