I'm having a hard time finding "how big is a billion" type facts

[Inchworm]

You know... like a billion minutes ago it was
"7:39:39 am LMT | Sunday, July 14, 109 AD (extrapolated Gregorian calendar)" from Wolfram

1,000,000,000 pennies stacks X high..

heartbeats

etc.

Anyone know any cool sites with silly facts like this?

[greenmutha]

1. Here's some:

From here, written in 1999:
http://mathforum.org/~sanders/geometry/GP10BillionEtc.html

"How big is a billion? If a billion kids made a human tower, they would stand up past the moon. If you sat down to count from one to one billion, you would be counting for 95 years. If you found a goldfish bowl large enough hold a billion goldfish, it would be as big as a stadium."

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate Washington spends it.

And here's a site dealing with the pennies:
http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/

"If you were
to stack all these pennies in a single pile, one atop the other, the stack would reach nearly one
thousand miles high. For comparison, note that the Space Shuttle typically orbits only 225 miles
above the Earth's surface.

(edited to add quote at bottom)

[Swede]

2. One saying I will always remember.

If someone gave you a million dollars and told you to spend a thousand dollars a day,you'd run out of money in 3 years. If someone gave a billion dollars and told you spend a thousand dollars,you'd run out of money in 3000 years.

[Inchworm]

3. Cool, thanks

:)

I'm trying to gather as many as I can to assist me in explaining how big 700 billion is.

:yourock:

[pokerfan]

4. a billion is a thousand million

From wiki:

The facts below give a sense of how large 1,000,000,000 (10⁹) is...

In terms of time:
* 10⁹ seconds is 114 days short of 32 calendar years (≈ 31.7 years).
* About 10⁹ minutes ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing and Christianity was emerging. (109 minutes is roughly 1,900 years.)
* About 10⁹ hours ago, modern human beings and their ancestors were living in the Stone Age (more precisely, the Middle Paleolithic). (109 hours is roughly 114,000 years.)
* About 10⁹ days ago, Australopithecus, an ape-like creature related to an ancestor of modern humans, roamed the African savannas. (109 days is roughly 2.7 million years.)
* About 10⁹ months ago, dinosaurs walked the earth during the late Cretaceous. (109 months is roughly 82 million years.)
* About 10⁹ years ago, the first multicellular eukaryotes appeared on Earth.
* The universe is currently thought to be about 13.7 x 10⁹ years old.

In terms of distance:
* 10⁹ centimetres is about the distance from Chicago to Tokyo.
* 10⁹ inches is 15,783 miles, more than halfway around the world and sufficient to reach any point on the globe from any other point.
* 10⁹ metres is almost three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
* 10⁹ kilometres is over six times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

In terms of finance:
* The possession of assets with total value of 10⁹ United States dollars would place a person among the world's wealthiest individuals.
* As visualized in a work by artist Michael Marcovici, this amount of money in stacks of hundred-dollar bills can fit on twelve wrapped pallets.

In terms of area:
* A billion square inches would be a square about one half mile on a side.
* A piece of finely woven bed sheet cloth that contained a billion holes would measure about 500 square feet, large enough to cover a moderate sized apartment.

In terms of volume:
* There are a billion cubic millimeters in a cubic meter.
* A billion grains of table salt or granulated sugar would occupy a volume of about two and a half cubic feet.
* A billion cubic inches would be a volume comparable to a large commercial building slightly larger than a typical supermarket.

In terms of natural landscape;
* A small mountain, slightly larger than Stone Mountain Georgia, United States, would weigh (have a mass of) a billion tons.

In terms of count:
A is a cube; B consists of 1000 cubes of type A. C consists of 1000 B's; and D 1000 C's. Thus there are 1 million A's in C; and 1,000,000,000 A's in D. Likewise, there are 1,000,000,000 cubic millimeters in a cubic meter.

[Inchworm]

5. I looked there, honest!

:blush:

My finding skilz musta been off :D

Thanks!

:hi:

[pokerfan]

6. it's easy to create your own

Google Calculator is great for this and is automatically invoked whenever it sees a mathematical expression in the search window. For example: