I'll think of a good title later

You may have heard the saying:

Humanity's greatest weakness is its inability to understand an exponential

I think this statement gives us too much credit. I think our weakness is that we simply don't understand numbers, specifically big numbers.

News bulletins & articles are peppered with *llion words these days but most people have little comprehension of just how big these numbers are or what they represent. I recently came across this useful thought exercise:

Without doing any calculations

Guess how long a million seconds is.

Now guess how long a billion seconds is (queue countdown music)...

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1,000,000 seconds = 11.57047 days
1,000,000,000 seconds = 31.709792 years

Slight difference.

The US National debt is somewhere around $13 trillion & the UK is at $10 trillion (see how other countries stack up here) everyone usually points & laughs at America for the size of their debt, but relatively speaking us little Brits absolutely dwarf our friends over the pond.

To pay off their debt the US's 300 million people would each have to contribute $100 dollars every week for 8.3 years. Would anyone miss $100 every week?

We in the UK would take 32 years to pay off our burden.

& that's without taking into account the interest on the current debt, or our inability to understand an exponential.

The US National Debt Clock in New York is soon to run out of digits & will be replaced by a new clock able to display up to a quadrillion dollars of debt.

A quadrillion seconds is 31709.792 millenia.