A Pepsi Ad, A Harrier Jet, And How We Don’t Understand Big Numbers
Literary Hub
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1/23/20
“As humans, we are not good at judging the size of large numbers. And even when we know one is bigger than another, we don’t appreciate the size of the difference… We know a million, a billion, and a trillion are different sizes, but we often don’t appreciate the staggering increases between them. A million seconds from now is just shy of eleven days and fourteen hours. Not so bad. I could wait that long. It’s within two weeks. A billion seconds is over thirty‑one years. A trillion seconds from now is after the year 33,700 CE.”