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What makes “billions and billions” so popular? It used to be that “millions” was the byword for a large number. The enormously rich were millionaries. The population of the Earth at the time of Jesus was perhaps 250 million people. There were almost 4 million Americans at the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787; by the beginning of World War II, there were 132 million. It is 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the Earth to the Sun. Approximately 40 million people were killed in World War I; 60 million in World War II. There are 31.7 million seconds in a year (as is easy enough to verify). The global nuclear arsenals at the end of 1980s contained an equivalent explosive power sufficient to destroy 1 million Hiroshimas. For many purposes and for long time, “million” was the quintessential big number.
But the times have changed. Now the world has a clutch of billionaries -- and not just because of inflation. The age of the Earth is well-established at 4.6 billion years. The human population is pushing 6 billion (written by Carl Sagan in 1997) people. Every birthday represent another billion kilometers around the Sun (the Earth is travelling around the Sun much faster than the Voyager spacecraft and travelling away from Earth). Four B-2 bombers cost a billion dollars. The U.S defense budget is, when hidden cost are accounted for, over $300 billion a year (written in 1997) the immediate fatalities in an all out nuclear war between United States and Russia are estimated to be around a Billion people. A few inches of a billion atoms side by side. And there are all those billions of stars and galaxies. ~ Page 5
An unambiguous way to determine what large number is being discussed is simply to count up the zeros after the one. But if there are many zeros, this can get a little tedious. That’s why we put commas, or spaces, after each group of three zeros. So a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 or 1 000 000 000 000. (In Europe one puts dots in place of commas.) for numbers bigger than a trillion, you have to count up how many triplets of 0s there are. It would be much easier still if, when y=we name a large number, we could just say straight how many zeros there are after the one. ~ Page 7
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