A billion in perspective—how big is a billion?
Updated: Feb 16, 2020
There are billionaires, hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, and over 7 billion people on this planet as of now. But the word billion often loses scale when we use it in casual conversation. So, today we take a billion, and we give it some perspective. So, how big is a billion?
A billion is very misleading
Now, this casual exercise involves patience and lots of it. If you count at the rate of 1 number per second, in whichever way you deem convenient, you’ll reach 3600 in an hour. This is the only standard way to perform this experiment—People can count faster than 1 number/sec for sure, but then it becomes a non-standardized procedure. So, we go on at this rate. By the time you reach the very end of the day, you will get to 86,400. You can carry on this irrational exercise without eating and sleeping, and by the time you reach 11th day noon, you will finally hit the million mark. Not bad—a week and a half to get to a million. But now things get interesting. If you had spent eleven and a half days to reach 1 million, you need to spend another 11 and a half days to get to the next million, and 33-34 days to get to 3 million and so on.
The misleading factor checks in when you think that a billion is something that comes right after a million, without accounting for the magnitude of separation between the two. And that separation is so large that by the time you reach 100 million, you will be 3 years older than when you started. Impressive? Wait until you reach half a billion, that’s 16 years away. The best way to understand the size of a billion is to count the seconds of a clock, well, you don’t have to count them, that’s kind of self-working. According to the 2020 population demographics, more than 50 percent of the population are below 30 years old, which means half of the current population haven’t encountered their billionth second in life yet! Now let that sink in. If you are a 25-year-old reading this, you still got 6 more years to go until you reach your billionth second on your 31st birthday.
A billion dollars with a capital B
What would you do if you had a billion dollars in coins—standard 1.95 mm[1], one dollar Canadian coins (loonies) to be specific. If I were you, I would stack them up, as tedious as the process is, it might give another perspective of what a billion is. It would take some time to make sense of this ‘impossible’ experiment, but by the time you stacked your 425,641st coin, you will have reached the top of Burj Khalifa. A pile with a million coins would soar above a typical cumulus cloud. Add four million more coins, and the pile eclipses Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world above sea level. But if you continue this exercise, all the way to a billion, quite painstakingly if I may add, the pile will have not just reached space, it will have reached the international space station and back, two times! And you would still have enough coins to reach Brussels from Paris, stacking them sideways.
If you did this experiment with 1mm thick paper, the billionth paper would be placed at almost 2.5 times the distance of the ISS from Earth’s surface.
Try reading a book with 1,000,000,000 words
This is for all the bookaholics out there. Some people chew through books fast, but the speed of the average book reader is just about 250 words per minute. So, I thought, great, maybe I’ll see how much time it would take for someone to read a billion words.
I haven’t read many books, but one of the best ones I’ve ever read is the Lord Of The Rings, by J.R.R Tolkien. The three books have a combined total of 443,120 words[2], just shy of half a million. At the average rate of 250 words per minute, it would take you 29 hours and 33 minutes to finish the book.
Now for some perspective. A book with a billion words is the equivalent of reading 2257 lord of the rings books! So, if you are an intense LOTR fan, then you probably might have done that already, but anyway, at the rate of 250 WPM, if you started reading that book today, you’ll finish it 7.6 years later! Talk about a good read.
Billion liters of water?
The other day I was drinking a can of soda and thought I’d represent a billion in liters as well because that’s what I do while drinking soda. An average human being drinks 2-3 liters of water a day, at least that’s the recommended amount that one should be drinking. Let’s consider the average lifespan of humans to be 85 years, give or take a few. So, if we drink the recommended quantity of water every day for the rest of our lives, it will amount to about 93,075 liters.
Now that sounds like a lot of water, but it’s really not that much. For instance, it would take about 27 people, drinking 3 liters of water a day for 85 years from an Olympic size swimming pool to drain it completely! An Olympic size swimming pool is no joke in terms of the water it can hold, which is about 2.5 million liters[3]. But a billion liters is much larger. It would take a lifetime effort of about 10,800 (approx.) people to drain a pool containing a billion liters. The average Olympic size swimming pool is 50 meters in length, 25 meters wide, and 2-3 meters deep. But our billion-liter pool is a million cubic meters in volume, with depth, length, and width of 100 meters, the equivalent of 400 Olympic size swimming pools!
Read more from sources
[1]. From the Saskatoon coin club. (Date: Unknown). Retrieved on 16th Feb 2020, from http://www.saskatooncoinclub.ca/articles/02a_coin_specs.html
[2]. From readinglength.com. Retrieved on 16th Feb 2020, from https://www.readinglength.com/book/isbn-0345339703
[3]. Wikipedia contributors. (2019, December 17). Olympic-size swimming pool. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:05, February 16, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Olympic-size_swimming_pool&oldid=931119564
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