PERSPECTIVE: Just how big is a billion?
We see in the news folks like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and many others — a total of 2,781, according to Forbes — are billionaires, and it makes us wonder just how much money that is.
A billion is a thousand million. Hard to grasp, isn’t it?
From University of California Museum of Paleontology Berkeley: If you were to save $100 a day, it would take 27,397.26 years to reach $1 billion.
To count out loud? 95.1 years. To walk a billion steps? That would be 15.278 times around the equator.
What if you were to print an asterisk — * — a billion times? At 4,000 asterisks per page, it would take 250,000 pages to show a billion.
A billion seconds is roughly 32 years.
If you were able to stack one billion pennies on top of each other, the stack would be almost 870 miles high.
One billion one dollar bills laid end-to-end would measure 96,900 miles, which is almost four times around the earth.
According to ThoughtCo.com, “The Piraha tribe is a group living in the jungles of South America. They are well known because they do not have a way to count past two.”
And we thought we had a rough time grasping big numbers.
“If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22,000 years to amass a fortune of one billion dollars.
“One billion ants would weigh over 3 tons — a little less than the weight of an elephant.
“One billion dollars divided equally among the U.S. population would mean that everyone in the United States would receive about $3.33.”
