Conceptualizing How Large One Billion Is
Understanding astronomically large numbers.
Good morning everyone,
Humans by nature have a hard time conceptualizing anything over a couple thousand of anything. But, this is of course by design. Our ancient ancestors weren’t concerned as much with how big one billion is over finding some food so they could eat. It’s simply a matter of priories.
However, nowadays the times have changed and being able to understand gigantic numbers is more important than it ever has been in the past comparatively.
Understanding One Million
On our journey to understating how truly massive one billion is were going to start smaller with one million.
For the first example, if you were to start counting at a rate of one number per second, it would take 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds to reach one million starting at one. That’s also if you took no breaks in counting whatsoever.
Another easy way to wrap our minds one million is to imagine you’re saving money at a rate of $100 dollars per day.
$1,000,000 / $100 =10,000 days.
It would roughly take you 27.5 years to save your way to one million dollars. ( thats without inflation taking its nasty bite)
How Big is One Billion?
Billions are a whole other another story. Conceptualizing one million is going to look like a walk in the park after you see how truly massive one billion of anything is.
Remember the example about counting at a rate of one number per second? Well, its 11.5 days roughly to reach one million and almost 32 years to reach one billion. The difference between a vacation and a career.
So we’ve discovered that saving one million dollars is feasible in your life time. However if you tried saving one billion dollars. At the same rate as before ($100/day) it would take you 27,397 years.
That means if you and each of your Children’s children lived till 90 years of age. It would take a little over 300 generations to reach one billion dollars saved.
This is the asterisks page , it contains 4,000 asterisks per page. If you were to stack these pages single sided. It would take 250 pages to reach one million asterisks. About a 1 inch high stack. But, one billion asterisks? You’re looking at 1,000 inches or about 83 feet. The size of an 8 story building,
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