I saw this today http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130120.html<p>I suppose that for a long time this machine or others like it were the most complex things people had made. When I was growing up in the 1970's I have memories that people claimed that the Saturn V, then the Space Shuttle and in the 1990's the International Space station were variously the most complex artifacts of our civilization.<p>I have been asked to do some talks about the development of technology and want to be systematic and rational, and most importantly not to look like a blow hard who knows nothing and is making stuff up! So, I would like to be able to ascribe a measure of complexity to devices in history. I have tried calculating the number of combinations that each device can be configured into, but this yields huge numbers (as combinations explode..) so huge that I simply don't think they mean much (ie. it can be said that the possible number of connections of the neurons in the brain is larger than the number of atoms in the universe, I cannot grasp the idea of the number of atoms in the universe, perhaps I am dumb, but I just can't picture it).<p>So - any ideas for a rational measure of device complexity that doesn't produce numbers like 10^67?