Posted in Science & Nature

Millions And Billions

Have you ever stopped and pondered what a million actually is? Sure, you might easily pass it off as the number 1,000,000, or a thousand thousands, but have you really tried to get your head around how big a number that is? For example, you may be able to visualise a hundred people, a thousand people or even tens of thousands of people in your head, but it is very hard to visualise an image of a million people.

Now consider this. When was a million seconds ago? You know a second is very short and a million is a very large number. But it is difficult to put the two together. Make a guess. Last year? Two months ago? Surprisingly, the answer is only a week and a half ago (11.6 days).
Then what about a billion seconds? A billion is a thousand million so you might think it is easy to just add some zeroes, but a billion seconds is 31.7 years ago. Just by changing one syllable, or adding three zeroes, we went from a scale of weeks to years. If we go one step further to a trillion seconds, you leap back in time 31,700 years. You can probably remember what happened a million seconds ago, you might not have even been born a billion seconds ago and our ancestors were still hunter-gatherers roaming Europe a trillion seconds ago. That is how mind-blowing the scale of large numbers can be.

Now let’s look at some other things to really understand how big a million and a billion can be. A million dollars (USD) could buy you a luxury house, a manufacturing line, a 41-acre island in Belize or over 200 years’ worth of coffee (if you drank two cups a day). A million dollars in $1 bills would weigh 1000kg and stack to 30 stories high. A billion dollars – even if you were to convert it into $100 bills – would weigh 10 tonnes, almost as heavy as the truck that would carry it.

The pitter-patter of raindrops on your face feels nice, but a million drops of water weighs 50kg and would break your neck. A billion red helium balloons would have enough lift to carry 14,000 tonnes – enough to lift a hundred small, two-storey houses up into the air. A million grains of rice will feed a person for almost two months, while a billion ants would weigh twice a standard car (3 tonnes total).

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(You should definitely check out Hank Green’s take on “a million seconds”, because everything is better if Hank Green is ranting about it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ7A0yTDiqQ)

Posted in History & Literature

Population

The following is a list, based on 2011 standards (world population 6.9 billion), of the most populous countries in the world:

  1. China (1.3 billion)
  2. India (1.2 billion)
  3. United States of America (311 million)
  4. Indonesia (238 million)
  5. Brazil (191 million)
  6. Pakistan (176 million)
  7. Nigeria (158 million)
  8. Bangladesh (151 million)
  9. Russia (143 million)
  10. Japan (128 million)