Big Numbers
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@djaboss Interesting! Makes sense. I think visual representations are the way to go. Visual > exponential number > indeterminate noun
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(Using US definitions where "billion" = 10⁹)
I have had good luck using seconds. 100,000 seconds is a little over a day. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is a little over 30 years. A trillion seconds is a little over 30,000 years. The earliest evidence of anything resembling agriculture, a kind of gardening, is from about 23,000 years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture)
Then I challenge them to pick a company and government program to compare profit and delivery cost. For example, Cameco, a uranium mining company headquartered in Saskatchewan has profits in the range of $200 million per year. Saskatchewan government eliminated our rural public transit (STC) because it cost $17 million more to operate than the revenue it brought in. Easy peasy. One company could have funded the shortfall and still be very profitable. Spread that across a bunch of companies and it would be little more than a rounding error in their profit and loss statements.
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@jadero Bullseye. The analogy for seconds is helpful for most people to comprehend the scale. People can swap seconds for dollars and get a sense of how astronomical the gap is between someone who has $100,000 in their account to someone with $1 million.. etc.
However, the exponential notations are not helpful for a common person. They are just another symbolic representation that obfuscates the size / scale of the number. Anyway, I think it's important to note that it is a heavy lift to change the way the business and media world presents their numbers ($1 billion dollars vs $10⁹ dollars)
Just my 2 cents...
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By the way, a trillion seconds is more closely estimated to 31,688 years, 8 months, and 26 days.
When we round to a trillion seconds is 30,000 years... we're DROPPING 1688 years, 8 months and 26 days.
In terms of time: (assuming the starting date is November 20, 2025, subtracting 1,688 years, 8 months, and 26 days lands on the date February 22, 337.
And in terms of money, plenty of people would take just the 26 days we are dropping which is more than $2 million.
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I took an astronomy class in college, and one thing the prof kept hammering was that humans are really bad at conceptualising numbers larger than a few hundred. In terms of the class, that meant changing units constantly (i.e. light-minutes to lightyears to parsecs, etc) to keep the overall number down.
For numbers as big as a trillion, not sure how helpful this is though
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(Using US definitions where "billion" = 10⁹)
I have had good luck using seconds. 100,000 seconds is a little over a day. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is a little over 30 years. A trillion seconds is a little over 30,000 years. The earliest evidence of anything resembling agriculture, a kind of gardening, is from about 23,000 years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture)
Then I challenge them to pick a company and government program to compare profit and delivery cost. For example, Cameco, a uranium mining company headquartered in Saskatchewan has profits in the range of $200 million per year. Saskatchewan government eliminated our rural public transit (STC) because it cost $17 million more to operate than the revenue it brought in. Easy peasy. One company could have funded the shortfall and still be very profitable. Spread that across a bunch of companies and it would be little more than a rounding error in their profit and loss statements.
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@jadero Bullseye. The analogy for seconds is helpful for most people to comprehend the scale. People can swap seconds for dollars and get a sense of how astronomical the gap is between someone who has $100,000 in their account to someone with $1 million.. etc.
However, the exponential notations are not helpful for a common person. They are just another symbolic representation that obfuscates the size / scale of the number. Anyway, I think it's important to note that it is a heavy lift to change the way the business and media world presents their numbers ($1 billion dollars vs $10⁹ dollars)
Just my 2 cents...
@skeet i agree, but wouldn't that also imply that: (1) "normal people" cannot really follow such discussions or contribute to them (because "they're anyway incapable of thinking in the realms of the big bonzos") and (2) we cannot hope to educate people so that they can really work with these dimensions (big numbers)?
i mean, yes they're unconceivably large, and so we simply need appropriate tools to handle these numbers, if we want to participate. -
Speaking of large numbers (gifted article):
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And, in honor of the first, newly minted Trillionaire... the WSJ confirms that people have no idea how much a trillion is.
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Fun story about scale: My son is visiting Prague while studying abroad this summer. Apparently, he stepped into a Rolex store and was amazed by the expensive watches. He asked "Who buys a $100k watch?" Then, he answered himself, "I guess Elon Musk."
I said, that watch has virtually no value to someone who is worth $1 Trillion dollars.
We did the math to determine the comparative value of a $100K watch to a person who is worth $1Million compared to a person who is worth $1 Trillion. The answer: Ten Cents.
Elon could give that watch out to guests as a party favor. A cheap party favor.
It's mind boggling how much $1 Trillion is. People do not get it.
That kind of concentration of wealth.... that kind of buying power... is truly insane.