a billion?

It's a big number. A really big number. 1,000 million. A million is hard to truly understand but a billion is pretty much beyond comprehension in any real sense. People talk about a billion dollars. What does that really mean? Here is one way to try and grasp the enormity of that number.

Right now it is Nov 16, 2016. A billion seconds ago it was March 8... 1985. Not a billion minutes, a billion seconds. That is 31 years, 8 months, 7 days, 19 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds.

If you spent $1 every second it would take you 31 years, 8 months, 7 days, 19 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds to spend a billion. Let that soak in.

A trillion seconds/dollars? 31,709.79 years. 31,000 years? That is older than the oldest known pottery. That is before we learned how to twist a rope together. That is before the last ice age (glacial maximum). Before harpoons were invented. The oldest known domesticated dog skulls are from about that time.

So if you spent $1 every second from the time we domesticated dogs you would have just spent a trillion dollars.

Sometime around Oct 15, 2018 I am going to hit 2,000,000,000 seconds. 63 years, 4 and a half months.