The difference between a million, a billion and a trillion

[linazelle]

Caller on Rhandi Rhodes just said:


A million seconds ago it was last week.

A billion seconds ago it was 1973.

A trillion seconds ago was before Christ.



His point was to illustrate the astronomical amount of money that is being spent by BushCo. A trillion dollars is anticipated on the Iraq war.

[Taxloss]

1. So how much is a Brazillion?

:hide:

[JVS]

2. NOOOOOOOOOOO

[karlrschneider]

3. An Amazonly hugh number!!11!1

:D

[paul_fromatlanta]

4. or why they should screen callers

A week ago was 60 * 24 * 7 = 10,080 minutes ago
1973 was 60 * 24 * 365 * 33 = 17,344,800 minutes ago
The year 1 AD was 60 * 24 * 365 * 2 005 = 1,053,828,000
or a billion minutes ago.

[linazelle]

11. I think it was seconds then --my bad.

[paul_fromatlanta]

13. No problem - you did a good job to quote that closely off the radio.

[Warpy]

5. There's another way to look at it

A rich man married a trophy wife. Part of the deal was that her mother was going to have to live with them. Well, he didn't want to sour the good thing he had going on with the supermodel, so he decided to get rid of the old battle axe by sending her shopping. He gave her an allowance of $1000 a day, enough to pay for a hotel in any tourist paradise.

For a million dollars, she'd be gone for almost three years.

For a billion dollars, she'd be gone for nearly 3,000 years. That's how long ago the Pharoahs ruled Egypt, before much of the bible was written.

For a trillion dollars, she'd be gone for almost three million years. That's how long ago apelike creatures stood up on their hind legs and banged two rocks together to crack nuts.

And we're how many trillion dollars in debt?

[paul_fromatlanta]

6. But the first human (Lucy) was about a trillion and a half minutes ago.

[CrispyQ]

7. Years ago the Parade magazine had an aritcle by Carl Sagan

& they also printed a small graphic called Big Numbers. I've hung onto that graphic all these years & reference it frequently.

=====

How long it would take to count to this number from 0 (one count per second, night & day)

One ........... 1 second
Thousand ..... 17 minutes
Million ...... 12 days
Billion ....... 32 years
Trillion ...... 32,000 years -- longer than there has been civilization on Earth
Quadrillion ... 32 million years -- longer than there have been humans on Earth
Quintillion ... 32 billion years -- more than the age of the Universe


I use it frequently to put into perspective the 6.4 Billion people on this planet -- if you counted each one at one per second it would take you almost 205 years to count them all.

[karlrschneider]

8. uh...fuzzy math. A million minutes is about 2 years...

:eyes:

[htuttle]

9. I believe it was 'seconds', not 'minutes'

I think he said that a trillion seconds ago was tens of thousands of years, IIRC.

[linazelle]

12. You are right, I corrected it in the post above. nt

[DrDebug]

10. One dollar is chewing gum

$10 is a meal
$100 is a day shopping
$1,000 is a slow computer
$10,000 is a used car
$100,000 is a small modest house
$1,000,000 is a four children
$10,000,000 is your direct family
$100,000,000 is your extended family
$1,000,000,000 is your local neighbourhood
$10,000,000,000 is a village
$100,000,000,000 is a town
$1,000,000,000,000 is a whole city

[pa28]

14. When making a point to a Freeper try this . . .

Give him or her a bit of rope and let him talk about how the 8 trillion debt is no big deal and the government has always been in debt.

Then ask them to tell you how many zeroes are in a trillion.

Works every time.