how do you picture a billion in your head?

Question

it's easy enough to think, okay, ten marbles. you arrange them in two rows of five and it's there in your head, easy as pie. then, 100? ten times that, okay. get real rocks and count out ten groups of ten, got it. but when you try to imagine millions upon billions of say, people on earth, or stars in the universe, the process becomes absurd. how do you get your head around such large numbers? how do you really comprehend the meaning of million years? a zillion atoms? etc.

Answer 1

First I use my fingers, then my toes. I only use my head if the number gets to 21.

Answer 2

I don't think most people can really visualise even moderately large numbers, let alone a number like a billion. The average person probably loses perspective completely when it comes to imagining any number higher than a thousand.

But visualising numbers in the hundreds, or even in the tens, requires us to construct a relative framework that we can use to compare magnitudes. We can only understand the size of a big number by cutting it up into multiples of a smaller number. It may not be farfetched to suggest that we cannot really instinctively (as opposed to comparatively) understand any number greater than 10 - the sum of our fingers and toes.

I recently read of an isolated tribe that had developed a counting system based on the only four numbers they recognised - one, two, "one more than two" and "many". Perhaps that suggests that our natural ability to comprehend large numbers is very limited and is only increased through learning, education and being exposed to numerical concepts. This would suggest that if you practice thinking of large numbers, your ability to comprehend them will increase!

Finally, how do you imagine a billion?
Well, walk in a straight line for 20 miles then stop. Picture a person standing in each of the footsteps you took on the 20 mile journey. Convert that single line into a 20 x 20 mile square, with a person standing on every footstep - that's a billion!

Answer 3

For a billion, I imagine little BBs that are 1mm in diameter. I fill up an aquarium with a billion of those. They neatly line up 1000 front to back, 1000 left to right, and 1000 top to bottom.
For a million years I think about how technology has changed in the past 1000 years, then imagine what kind of technology we'll have after repeating that much change 1000 times. Holy cow! Also, I think backwards in time and realize how mentally challenged "people" were back then.
For 7 billion people, I just think of the WTC towers being able to hold 50,000 people so I imagine a city that's 100 towers wide and 1000 towers long, each 100 stories high.

Answer 4

I tend to think of a billion by realizing that a billion seconds is about 31 and a half years, while a million seconds is only about 11 and a half days.

If you can imagine a thousand pebbles in a row, imagine a million by imagining a thousand rows of a thousand pebbles each. This gives a square of a million pebbles. Then, a thousand layers of these squares would give a total of a billion pebbles. The problem is that it is rather difficult to imagine a thousand pebbles in a row.

Answer 5

or a billion dollars, your desendent would have to work for 4 or 5 generations. 1 with 9 zero's.

there are about 300 billions stars in our galaxy alone. There are over 100 billion galaxys in the know universe.

Answer 6

Usually for billion I just think of the 6 billion people on Earth. My city seems big and its only 50,000 people, so you'd need 20,000 more of these for a billion. Other than that, you pretty much can't get your head around it. Just kind of go with the numbers and try not to think about it too much.

And zillion technically isn't a word.

Answer 7

Making a true scale model of the solar system helps, but you really can't picture such large numbers.

Answer 8

The human mind can't fathom such a number

Answer 9

The Mathematics of Probability Refutes "Coincidence"

What has been said so far shows the extraordinary balances among the forces that make human life possible in this universe. The speed of the Big Bang's explosion, the values of the four fundamental forces, and all the other variables that we will be examining in the chapters ahead and which are vital for existence have been arranged according to an extraordinary precision.

Let us now make a brief digression and consider the coincidence theory of materialism. Coincidence is a mathematical term and the possibility of an event's occurrence can be calculated using the mathematics of probability. Let's do so.

Taking the physical variables into account, what is the likelihood of a universe giving us life coming into existence by coincidence? One in billions of billions? Or trillions of trillions of trillions? Or more?

Roger Penrose, a famous British mathematician and a close friend of Stephen Hawking, wondered about this question and tried to calculate the probability. Including what he considered to be all variables required for human beings to exist and live on a planet such as ours, he computed the probability of this environment occurring among all the possible results of the Big Bang.

According to Penrose, the odds against such an occurrence were on the order of 1010123 to 1.

It is hard even to imagine what this number means. In math, the value 10123 means 1 followed by 123 zeros. (This is, by the way, more than the total number of atoms 1078 believed to exist in the whole universe.) But Penrose's answer is vastly more than this: It requires 1 followed by 10123 zeros.


Roger Penrose: "This number tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been."
Or consider: 103 means 1,000, a thousand. 10103 is a number that that has 1 followed by 1000 zeros. If there are six zeros, it's called a million; if nine, a billion; if twelve, a trillion and so on. There is not even a name for a number that has 1 followed by 10123 zeros.

In practical terms, in mathematics, a probability of 1 in 1050 means "zero probability". Penrose's number is more than trillion trillion trillion times less than that. In short, Penrose's number tells us that the 'accidental" or "coincidental" creation of our universe is an impossibility.

Concerning this mind-boggling number Roger Penrose comments:

This now tells how precise the Creator's aim must have been, namely to an accuracy of one part in 1010123. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full in the ordinary denary notation: it would be 1 followed by 10123 successive 0's. Even if we were to write a 0 on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe- and we could throw in all the other particles for good measure- we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed. 26

The numbers defining the design and plan of the universe's equilibrium play a crucial role and exceed comprehension. They prove that the universe is by no means the product of a coincidence, and show us "how precise the Creator's aim must have been" as Penrose stated.

In fact in order to recognize that the universe is not a "product of coincidences" one does not really need any of these calculations at all. Simply by looking around himself, a person can easily perceive the fact of creation in even the tiniest details of what he sees. How could a universe like this, perfect in its systems, the sun, the earth, people, houses, cars, trees, flowers, insects, and all the other things in it ever have come into existence as the result of atoms falling together by chance after an explosion? Every detail we peer at shows the evidence of Allah's existence and supreme power. Only people who reflect can grasp these signs.

In the creation of the heavens and earth, and the alternation of the night and day, and the ships which sail the seas to people's benefit, and the water which Allah sends down from the sky- by which He brings the earth to life when it was dead and scatters about in it creatures of every kind - and the varying direction of the winds, and the clouds subservient between heaven and earth, there are Signs for people who use their intellect. (Surat al-Baqara:164)

http://www.hyahya.org/create03.php

Answer 10

Well, you have to be smarter than those marbles your playing with, and you have to have more mental imagery than a box of rocks.