How big is a mole? Good question! How big is a mole? Quite big actually. With out using scientific notation, a mole is: 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 amount of things! How large is this? Allow me to illustrate... This circle is about a half an inch. A mole of these would reach 3.01 X 1023 inches. How big is that? That is about 808,134.83 light years. The below calculation is how I came to this conclusion. If you were to travel a mole of the above spot, you would no longer be in the known universe. Infact, If you traveled out that far, the light from a star 5 times the size of our solar system wouldn't reach you. That is the size of a mole. Really bloody big. Another anology is that if that speck you see above you is the size of the earth, you'd have to travel to alpha centuari before you were a mole of spots away. Some more awe inspiring examples are as follows: An Avogadro's number of standard soft drink cans would cover the surface of the earth to a depth of over 200 miles. If you had Avogadro's number of unpopped popcorn kernels, and spread them across the United States of America, the country would be covered in popcorn to a depth of over 9 miles. If we were able to count atoms at the rate of 10 million per second, it would take about 2 billion years to count the atoms in one mole.