Section 1.3 – Big Numbers

Section 1.3 – How big is a million – a billion – a trillion?

“We used to call these astronomical numbers, but now the national debt is bigger than that! Maybe we should call them economical numbers!” – Richard Feinman

All the time we are given statistics on the news and elsewhere mentioning sums of money or other figures measured in millions, billions and trillions.  Do you just allow these numbers to wash over you without really comprehending what is being communicated? Do you just assume that somebody somewhere can make sense of this?

I’m going to give you a handle on visualising these sorts of magnitudes.

First of all let’s take a volume the size of a small sugar cube, 1 cm on each side: how big would 1 million of those be?
… It would be a cubic metre – the size of the jumbo bag of gravel.

What about a billion of them? …This would take up the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, 50 metres long. 20 metres wide, and one metre deep.

What about a trillion? They would fill a reservoir – half a kilometre long, 200 metres wide and 10 metres deep.

Let’s think about $1 million in money: suppose it was in $100 bills. You could fit $1 million in $100 bills into a briefcase.>

How about  $1 billion? To carry $1 billion worth of hundred dollar bills, it would take a 20 foot shipping container, stuffed completely full.

And for $1 trillion? You would need a freight train 6 km long, with all the boxcars stacked tight with hundred dollar bills.

What could you buy with $1 million? Well, you could buy a small flat in central London, about fifteen terraced houses in Rotherham, or three fairly high end Ferraris.

With $1 billion you could buy enough Ferraris to sit together nose to tail in a traffic jam on the motorway three lanes wide, and 4 km long.

With $1 trillion you could buy enough Ferraris to sit in a traffic jam three lanes wide all the way from Miami to San Francisco!

How long does it take to earn $1 million? For a typical worker earning $25,000 a year it would take an entire working lifetime of 40 years. For the chief executive of an average Fortune 500 corporation it would take five weeks. For football player Carlos Tevez it would take about nine days. For the world’s top financiers, about 6 hours.

How long would it take to earn $1 billion? Well, for that typical worker it would take it would take 40,000 years. The top 20 sports stars in the world together earn about $1 billion between them in a year. Hedge fund boss James Simon earns $1 billion every eight months.

Examples in the millions:

  • $1m –  cost of arming three Reaper drones, with two bombs and two Hellfire missiles on each one.
  • $1.5 – cost of one cruise missile.
  • $20m – cost to upgrade one nuclear warhead. The United States is currently planning to upgrade its entire stock of 3000 of them.
  • $85m – cost of one intercontinental ballistic missile.
  • 1m people – the number of lives that could be saved each year if clean water and sanitation were available to them.

Some things in the billions:

  • $8Bn – the cost of a nuclear submarine.
  • $10Bn – the amount Europeans spend annually on ice cream.
  • $20Bn – the United States spends currently each year on nuclear weapons.
  • $20Bn – the amount that American citizens spend annually on pet food.
  • $100Bn – the amount Europeans spend annually on alcoholic beverages.
  • $10Bn – the cost of providing clean water and sanitation everywhere on the planet

Examples in the trillions:

  • $8 trillion – the cost of American military expenditure during the Cold War. Presumably a similar amount was also spent by the Soviet Union.
  • $5.5 trillion – amount the United States spent developing and building nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996.
  • $18.6 trillion – annual GDP of the United States.
  • $14.6 trillion – the net assets owned by the 50 richest individuals in the world.
  • $??? – the total assets owned by the poorest 4 billion inhabitants of the world are difficult to estimate, but are almost certainly less than $14 trillion.
  • $76 trillion – the total value of goods and services traded in the whole world in 2014.
  • $1200 trillion – the total value of financial derivatives held by banks and other financial institutions.

This is Section 1.3 of my forthcoming book The World in 2100: What might be Possible for Humanity? It is the opening segment of the ‘Patterns and Numbers’ theme. When we return to this thread, the next topic will be The Dynamics of Exponential Growth.

If you haven’t already done so, you can register to receive a free review copy just before it goes on general sale later this summer. Registering will also take you straight to Chapter 1 – The Foundations which will give you more idea of what the book will cover.

Derek