What really is a million, or a billion? My friend Pat Singleton put this into perspective for me in terms I could really grasp.
- 1 million seconds equal 11 and 1/2 days.
- 1 billion seconds equal 31 and 3/4 years.
- 1 trillion seconds equal 31,710 years.
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This post has been one of our most popular. I’m not sure why so many people search for “million vs. billion”. I hope Pat’s example is helpful in picturing the huge size of these numbers.
You may also be interested in the differences in the American and European definitions of million, billion and trillion. The best one I found is Names for Large Numbers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In Pat’s example:
* million = 1,000,000
* billion = 1,000,000,000
* trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
Another way to visualize these mind-boggling numbers is through using pennies, at The MegaPenny Project.
It’s probably popular due to the difference between the imperial (US) and metric (rest of world) naming conventions – that’s what landed me here :)
Yes, Anon, that’s certainly it. See the link to Names for Large Numbers in the first comment.
James Niskala let me know by email how he ended up here:
“Just wanted to say that what drew me to this article was a desire to illustrate how incredibly large the national debt has become (now over 20 trillion)
Most people know it’s out of hand, but even they don’t really grasp what phenomenal amounts we are talking about.
Thank you so very much.”