Some of you may have heard it. The age-old joke of the CVS receipt. I was curious, so I did some research. The average CVS receipt is 26 and 1/2 inches long. So that means that a football field is 72.45 receipts long. But we aren’t done yet.

Using this, we can calculate that the circumference of Earth is 6×10^6 receipts. To simplify local distances, we will be using receipt miles, or the amount of receipts in 1 mile. 1 RM is equal to 2,391 receipts.

There is 80,000 miles of wire supporting the Golden Gate Bridge. That means that the total combined length of all the wire in the bridge is equivalent to 1.9×10^8 receipts.

Now at this point the numbers are getting too high, so we will be using solely scientific notation. The Earth is 92.9 million miles away from the Sun. That’s 9.3×10^7 miles for short. This means that the amount of receipts you could fit between the Earth and the sun is 3×10^7 receipts.

Now let’s get on a cosmic scale. The distance between the Sun and the Kuiper Belt’s inner edge is approximately 30 Astronomical Units. Now we need a new unit: RAU, or Receipt Astronomical Units. Since one AU is the distance between Earth and the Sun, we don’t need extra calculations. One RAU is equal to 3×10^7 receipts. So, using this, we know that the edge of the Kuiper Belt is 9×10^8 receipts.

Let’s get universal. Our galaxy is 52,850 lightyears across. For this we will need a new unit: the Receipt Lightyear, or the RLY. One lightyear is equal to 6.3×10^4 AU. So one RLY is 1.9×10^12 receipts. Again, using these numbers we can infer that our Milky Way is a whopping width of 9.8×10^16 CVS receipts.

Now for our final calculation. The entirety of the observable universe is 4.6×10^10 lightyears. We can multiply this to find that all the matter that we can see using billions of years of technological innovation is located in a sphere of space with a radius of 8.7×10^22 CVS receipts.

Thank you for attending my TedTalk.