The news,
and the government, throw around the numbers billion and trillion as if they are
talking about the cost of a new car: a two-trillion-dollar tax cut, a three
trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, a two trillion-dollar covid relief
package.
Compared to
this, the world population of seven-billion doesn’t sound like so much. And a million is chump chance to many people;
the Jaguar C-X75 automobile cost $1.1 million.
Let’s put
this in perspective:
If you took
a stick and banged it on your kitchen table once-per-second, twenty-four hours
a day non-stop; it would take you twelve days to bang out a million.
Banging out
a billion would take you thirty-two years, and to bang out the population of
the earth (seven-billion) would take two-hundred and twenty-four years.)
It would
take thirty-two thousand years (32,000) to bang out one trillion, and that very
likely exceeds way past the sell-by date our earth.
the Ol’Buzzard
Thanks for putting it in perspective!
ReplyDeleteAll those numbers give me a headache.
ReplyDeleteYes.... the conflagration of larger and larger numbers is mind-numbing (but not in a good way). At some point they begin to lose meaning a we then lose perspective.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to mention that I too really enjoy Shakespeare. It has been a few years since I have purposefully read some of the works again... but in college, even though not any required part of my major, I ended up purposefully enrolling in three different English courses that ended up allowing me to read (and discuss) all of the known Shakespeare plays. It was great... and was a wonderful diversion away from JUST science classes.
PipeTobacco
Council chambers quibble about $1000 items because they understand them. But a million dollar item gets passed quickly.
ReplyDelete