The best visual description of the size of one billion?

[scheherazade]

That's what I said not the quantity the units.
Strawman I'm afraid.

First lesson in arguing with a woman......

Even when you are technically correct, you will not prevail.

I used your own words.

It remains up to you to clarify your meaning, which is ever subject to the interpretation of the viewer.

Please punctuate your first sentence. It is ambiguous. :bugeye:

 

[Pete]

You are not imagining how many pennies one billion pennies is by equating how many buses one billion pennies would fill. All you are doing is imagining 5 full buses of pennies, which is no more imaging a billion then before you started.

Think of it as a ratio.

5 buses full of pennies to one penny = a billion to one.

one second to 30 years = a billion to one

A tiny grain of fine sand to a bucket full of sand = a billion to one

 

[kira]

Everybody knows the size of 1 liter of water. 1 liter is 1000 ml.
1 ml is about 20 drops of water from an eye dropper.

How big is 1 billion ml of water?

Now let's think of a swimming pool with the size of a basket ball court (usually about 400 sq meters) and a depth of 2.5 meter. The volume of the swimming pool is 400 x 2.5 = 1000 cubic meter = 1 billion ml.

 

[Motor Daddy]

Think of it as a ratio.

5 buses full of pennies to one penny = a billion to one.

Again, you are giving a visual of 5 buses full of pennies, not a visual of a billion pennies. You can't even imagine how many pennies are in 1 bus, let alone 5 buses.

When you think of a bus full of pennies, do thoughts of 200 million pennies come to mind?

You can't imagine a billion pennies. If I can't you can't.

 

[RJBeery]

You can't imagine a billion pennies. If I can't you can't.

You may be right that no one can actually "imagine" a billion pennies in the same way that we can "see" 5 pennies in our head (without counting them), but Pete is closer to being able to do it than almost anyone on this forum.

 

[Motor Daddy]

You may be right that no one can actually "imagine" a billion pennies in the same way that we can "see" 5 pennies in our head (without counting them), but Pete is closer to being able to do it than almost anyone on this forum.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. How many pennies do you suspect Pete can imagine in his head? How many can you imagine?

 

[Pete]

Again, you are giving a visual of 5 buses full of pennies, not a visual of a billion pennies. You can't even imagine how many pennies are in 1 bus, let alone 5 buses.

When you think of a bus full of pennies, do thoughts of 200 million pennies come to mind?

You can't imagine a billion pennies.

You can't imagine five buses full of pennies? :bugeye:

If I can't you can't.

I'm sure you can't imagine otherwise.

 

[Motor Daddy]

You can't imagine five buses full of pennies? :bugeye:


I'm sure you can't imagine otherwise.

What color bus? What make and model? What is the volume of the inside of the bus that is available to fill with pennies? Could you stack pennies perfectly in that volume without having unused volume, ie the volume of the bus available for pennies/volume of penny=how many pennies you could fit??? How much wasted space is there? Am I supposed to be imagining how each and every penny is placed in the bus, heads or tails, vertical or horizontal, and the year of each penny? Are they new pennies or corroded pennies?

You're fooling yourself, Pete.

 

[wlminex]

hmmm... •one grain of sand has a volume of 1.3 * 10^-9 cubic feet (from gomath.com)

Soo... on billion grains, 10^9 grains should take up about .77 cubic feet.

So about, and this is a guess based upon my granddaughter's pail in the bathtub, that it's about the size of a child's large pail full of sand.


That's a billion.

AlexG . . . .take a break and visit my new thread: The EEMU Hypothesis! Waiting to hear from you!

wlminex

 

[Big Chiller]

It remains up to you to clarify your meaning, which is ever subject to the interpretation of the viewer.

Even when a common light is shed on the topic it is ever subject to the interpretation of an individual?

 

[scheherazade]

Even when a common light is shed on the topic it is ever subject to the interpretation of an individual?

The common light is perceived somewhat differently by each individual, in my experience. Therein lays much of the frustration of communication.

Even when we seem to be in total agreement, there may be differences in what each party comprehends that the other has understood.

 

[AlexG]

Did you know that over 1 billion people are now overweight? I couldn't get them all together for a group photo op, but here is what they all have in common.

I submit this as my entry for a visual reference of not one, but 99 billion.

Note to Mods: Request your indulgence of a commercial image for the purpose of numerical visual reference. This is not an endorsement.

I haven't seen one of those Mac's 'x billion sold' signs in a long long time.

When I was 18, I thought that the best job you could have was as a roving inspector for Mac's. Of course, that was back in 1970, when MacD's was actually quite good.

 

[Fudge Muffin]

if everyone who's ever posted in this forum met up in some room (it would have to be big), and every person shook hands with every other person in the room once, but also brung their pets, who also shook hands with everyone in the room once, around one billion hand shakes would occur. It would also take us several days.

 

[Dywyddyr]

At least 3 problems:

1) How do you know how many have posted here? Hint - the number of members is NOT the number of posters. Many have a zero post count.
2) How do you know how many members have pets?
3) You haven't explained how to visualise that many posters and pets (even if you did have a firm number).

 

[Fudge Muffin]

At least 3 problems:

1) How do you know how many have posted here? Hint - the number of members is NOT the number of posters. Many have a zero post count.
2) How do you know how many members have pets?
3) You haven't explained how to visualise that many posters and pets (even if you did have a firm number).

well at least mines better than your's- I can barely visualise 3.

 

[Big Chiller]

The common light is perceived somewhat differently by each individual, in my experience. Therein lays much of the frustration of communication.

Even when we seem to be in total agreement, there may be differences in what each party comprehends that the other has understood.

We will absolutely have different understandings I agree, everything physical is relative or subjective. By being in agreement the difference in comprehension is being 'bypassed'. Nothing physical is absolute and even immaterial things like electromagnetic fields are physical.

 

[scheherazade]

We will absolutely have different understandings I agree, everything physical is relative or subjective. By being in agreement the difference in comprehension is being 'bypassed'. Nothing physical is absolute and even immaterial things like electromagnetic fields are physical.

It is the immaterial that supports the physical, is it not? Where science is unable to attach a conceptual numerical reference (measurement) is where much of subjective and objective comprehension collides.

But to keep in the good graces of this thread, we need discuss the visual description of one billion, even if abstractly.

How fortunate that the original poster did not request a visual description of zero (nothing) instead.

Try it sometime. Try to visualize absolutely nothing.

Working graveyards and sleep deprived, I'm bad. Making tossed word salad on you again.

 

[Vincenzo]

Hi Wexler,

The list is out of date... a billion seconds is about 31 years 8 months.


Substitute "peppercorn", "match head", "tic tac", or "rice bubble".


That one's just wrong.
For starters, your forearm isn't 1000 times longer than your thumb (unless your forearm is like 150 feet long!), and going 1000 time longer again only takes you 50km away.


That doesn't sound right either. Grains 1mm across would make pretty coarse sand, but a billion grains would take up roughly 1 cubic metre and weigh about 1.5 metric tonnes. That's a big ute load (pick-up truck), not a dump truck.
Your average scoop of beach or desert sand would have much smaller grains. A billion 0.2mm grains would only weigh 15kg, and fit in a big bucket.


Hmm.

Try counting.
Let's say you want to put yourself to sleep, so you count sheep. Say you can count really fast, about 10 sheep every second.
Those sheep are really running past fast!

• In a second, 10 sheep go by
• In a minute, 600 sheep go by
• In an hour, 36000 sheep go by
• All night (12 hours - you have bad insomnia), over 430,000 sheep go by
• In a week (24x7), 6 million sheep go by (You should really see a doctor about this problem)
• In a month, 25 million sheep go by
• After a year, you've seen over 300 million sheep. That's a year of your life you'll never get back!
• Keep going... if your concentration and sanity hold, you can count a billion sheep in only 3 years and 3 months. Hooray!

Or maybe money. Try the Megapenny project:

Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a "billion" really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: "What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?"​

Here is a picture of one billion pennies from that site:

There’s no photo there.

 

[Beer w/Straw]

There’s no photo there.

Uh, this thread is over a decade old...