5 ms·
To give you an idea of how big one billion actually is, (assuming you count once per second) it takes over 11 days to count up to 1 million. It takes over 31 y
by weavie 11y ago
To give you an idea of how big one billion actually is, (assuming you count once per second) it takes over 11 days to count up to 1 million.
It takes over 31 years to count up to 1 billion.
- arcadeparade 11y agoWow that's almost 32 years.
- Dysprosium 11y agoSeems like our brain think in log.
- andreyf 11y agoThat's probably because the size of decimal digits written down on a piece of paper is in log.
- Gladdyu 11y agoOur number system is in log: value(number) ~ 10^length(number)
- egillie 11y agoThere's some evidence for that! http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5880/1217.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5880/1217.abstract
- monochromatic 11y agoProbably a lot longer than that. > assuming you count once per second One second is counting pretty slow for small numbers, but it's counting really fast for big numbers. (How quickly can you say "three hundred twenty five million seven hundred ninety six thousand one hundred seventeen"?) And there are a lot more big numbers than small numbers.
- adnrw 11y agoI agree that at some point (probably reasonably early on actually) it would start taking longer to say the number out loud than one second, so you'd fall behind. However we're talking about counting which is not necessarily saying it out loud. You could just be pushing a button every second, or watching a drop of water fall from a pipe at a constant rate. Anyway, I remember learning this little fact as a kid and it making the numbers (and the difference in magnitude between them) much more tangible. For context, at a rate of 1/sec/sec: 1 = 1 sec 10 = 10 sec 100 = ~1.5 min 1000 = ~17 min 10,000 = ~3 hours 100,000 = ~1 day 1,000,000 = ~12 days 10,000,000 = ~4 months 100,000,000 = ~3 years 1,000,000,000 = ~32 years
- weavie 11y agoIt may also be worth noting (when discussing national debt and the like) that 1 trillion = ~32,000 years.
- bobwaycott 11y ago-OT- My grandfather, when I was a teenager, wanted to impress upon me the vastness of large money numbers. He was wanting me to better understand how large these sums were when discussing personal wealth in the millions+, as well as how even larger such sums were when discussing government expenditures. He made me do this same math, suggesting spending $1/second. When I calculated, and wound up with these same numbers for spending $1M & $1B--which I always rounded up to 12 days & 32 years respectively--he succeeded in cementing his point in my mind. I have never forgotten it in over 20 years.