Since it was brought up in the thread (https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,35952) about how much work the Ripple team is doing (which is a lot) I thought I would go through a little exercise to help indicate the potential size of the MCM1 project.
The batch numbers in the project are 7 digits long which indicates the possibility of 9,999,999 batches each of which appears to have 9,999 work units per batch, currently each with a quorum of 2. This gives us 9,999,999 times 9999 times 2 which equals 199,979,980,002 possible work units to be crunched under their numbering scheme. Given our current average of 4:19:01 per work unit(as of the 12:00 update) which equals 15541 seconds it would take 199,979,980,002 times 15541 seconds or 3,107,888,869,211,080 seconds to complete all the work units. This amounts to 98,550,510 years of crunch time. The highest number of years for this project which we have completed so far is 282. Round up to 300 years per day for ease of division. At this rate it would take about 328,500 years to complete this project. As this is a totally unreachable number by today's standards I am quite sure the project researchers are not contemplating anything near this number of work units.
If they are contemplating a five year project I am guessing the potential number of work units to be in the neighborhood of about 500,000,000 with a quorum of 2 gives 1,000,000,000 total work units to crunch. At 500,000 per day this would take a little over 5 years. And we have not yet reached that level.
I have made a number of assumptions here, some of which may not turn out to be true as the project progresses. Others should feel free to throw their two cents worth in. At any rate, these are the numbers which lead me to believe we are not in any danger of running out of work.
Cheers
Edit: added link