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Just how large is a billion?
Dec. 2nd, 2010 07:04 amSorry for the long gap between entries... a very long time spent catching up on work and other responsibilities after the China trip, plus a long visit with my in-laws over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, followed by more playing of catch-up.
I'm currently reading Matter, by Iain M. Banks... one of his trademark novels of "the Culture", a far-future human society with near-magical levels of technology. Banks does many things well, including his characters and his tongue-firmly-in-cheek takes on certain issues, and though he touches on many serious issues in this series, he never takes himself too seriously. It's all glorious fun, with potboiler plots spread across a diverse and galaxy-spanning backdrop.
One of the interesting things in Matter is the time scale: among many other niceties of plot, the story revolves around an archeological excavation that is unearthing relics on the order of a billion years old. While reading, it struck me that I took this as verbal shorthand for "really, really old", but didn't really pause to admire the sheer scale of this timescape. So I asked myself: Just how large is a billion, really, in human terms?
Imagine the following exercise: From the moment you're old enough to count beyond about a thousand and have been given some time to enjoy being a child (say, about 10 years old), your task is to start counting up to a billion years, at a rate of 1 year per second. How long would it take you to complete the task?
Let's assume you can count for 12 hours per day, the other 12 hours being reserved for eating, sleeping, and other necessaries. It would take you about 280 thousand hours (actually, 277,778) to finish. That's about 23 thousand days, or 63 years (not accounting for leap years). In short, if you started at age 10, you'd be 73 before you finished: an entire lifetime (and more than the biblical three score and ten) spent doing little else but counting.
Yes, friends: a billion is a vurrah large number. (Class exercise: If you had to record the number you'd reached at the end of each day on paper, as a memory aid to help you remember where to start the next day, how many trees would you have to kill to generate the necessary amount of paper? For extra credit, how many filing cabinets would you require to store the resulting heaps of paper?)
I'm currently reading Matter, by Iain M. Banks... one of his trademark novels of "the Culture", a far-future human society with near-magical levels of technology. Banks does many things well, including his characters and his tongue-firmly-in-cheek takes on certain issues, and though he touches on many serious issues in this series, he never takes himself too seriously. It's all glorious fun, with potboiler plots spread across a diverse and galaxy-spanning backdrop.
One of the interesting things in Matter is the time scale: among many other niceties of plot, the story revolves around an archeological excavation that is unearthing relics on the order of a billion years old. While reading, it struck me that I took this as verbal shorthand for "really, really old", but didn't really pause to admire the sheer scale of this timescape. So I asked myself: Just how large is a billion, really, in human terms?
Imagine the following exercise: From the moment you're old enough to count beyond about a thousand and have been given some time to enjoy being a child (say, about 10 years old), your task is to start counting up to a billion years, at a rate of 1 year per second. How long would it take you to complete the task?
Let's assume you can count for 12 hours per day, the other 12 hours being reserved for eating, sleeping, and other necessaries. It would take you about 280 thousand hours (actually, 277,778) to finish. That's about 23 thousand days, or 63 years (not accounting for leap years). In short, if you started at age 10, you'd be 73 before you finished: an entire lifetime (and more than the biblical three score and ten) spent doing little else but counting.
Yes, friends: a billion is a vurrah large number. (Class exercise: If you had to record the number you'd reached at the end of each day on paper, as a memory aid to help you remember where to start the next day, how many trees would you have to kill to generate the necessary amount of paper? For extra credit, how many filing cabinets would you require to store the resulting heaps of paper?)