3 ms·

Doesn't seem unfathomable to me. $36B is just a square grid of 190 x 190 San Francisco houses.

by xyzzy4 10y ago

CalRobert 10y ago
Visualizations like this are handy to get your head around big numbers. I remember thinking as a kid that a million was an incredibly huge number - how could you even fit a million dollar bills in a room! But then consider that a marble is (very roughly) one cc, and you could fit a million marbles in a cube one meter per side, and it doesn't seem so great. You could (very roughly) fit that much in a hot tub. A billion? Well, just cover a football field with hot tubs and that gets you around _10_ billion marbles. If marbles cost a buck a pop (they don't, but think of something that does and is the same size) China is building the project for the cost of covering a football pitch with hot tubs full of marbles. Or, consider that copper is around $4800 per tonne (1000 kg, or one Megagram). Copper is about 9 g/ml, and the aforementioned cubes are a million ml each, so that's 9 Megagrams per hot tub. You could cover a football pitch with hot tubs and only fill them about 1/9th full of copper for the money China is using to build this rail system, which suddenly makes it seem like a pretty good deal. Also, I never knew just how vaguely defined football pitches were : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch " The two goal lines must be between 45 and 90 m (50 and 100 yd) and be the same length.[3] The two touch lines must also be of the same length, and be between 90 and 120 m " You could have a field with over twice as much area as another and they'd both be legal. Edit: I made a huge mathematical error thinking about the copper bit of the above. $36B buys 7.5 million tonnes of copper, which is about 750,000 hot tubs' worth. A football pitch holding 10,000 hot tubs (100x100) could be stacked with 75 layers of hot tubs of copper. Really, I just need to think of a metal that costs $1 per ml.

Doesn't seem unfathomable to me. $36B is just a square grid of 190 x 190 San Francisco houses.

by xyzzy4 10y ago

Doesn't seem unfathomable to me. $36B is just a square grid of 190 x 190 San Francisco houses.

Visualizations like this are handy to get your head around big numbers. I remember thinking as a kid that a million was an incredibly huge number - how could you even fit a million dollar bills in a room! But then consider that a marble is (very roughly) one cc, and you could fit a million marbles in a cube one meter per side, and it doesn't seem so great. You could (very roughly) fit that much in a hot tub. A billion? Well, just cover a football field with hot tubs and that gets you around _10_ billion marbles. If marbles cost a buck a pop (they don't, but think of something that does and is the same size) China is building the project for the cost of covering a football pitch with hot tubs full of marbles. Or, consider that copper is around $4800 per tonne (1000 kg, or one Megagram). Copper is about 9 g/ml, and the aforementioned cubes are a million ml each, so that's 9 Megagrams per hot tub. You could cover a football pitch with hot tubs and only fill them about 1/9th full of copper for the money China is using to build this rail system, which suddenly makes it seem like a pretty good deal. Also, I never knew just how vaguely defined football pitches were : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch " The two goal lines must be between 45 and 90 m (50 and 100 yd) and be the same length.[3] The two touch lines must also be of the same length, and be between 90 and 120 m " You could have a field with over twice as much area as another and they'd both be legal. Edit: I made a huge mathematical error thinking about the copper bit of the above. $36B buys 7.5 million tonnes of copper, which is about 750,000 hot tubs' worth. A football pitch holding 10,000 hot tubs (100x100) could be stacked with 75 layers of hot tubs of copper. Really, I just need to think of a metal that costs $1 per ml.