To put those chances in perspective, that’s about the number of seconds in six years. A recent Mega Millions lottery had 1-in-175,711,536 odds of winning. Also in this range are the odds of winning the really big lotteries. If each of your steps around the Earth were represented by a dot like those from the grids in the last post, the dots would fill a 6m x 6m square.ġ0 8 (100 million) – Now we’re at the number of books ever published in human history (130 million), and at the top of this range, the estimated number of words a human being speaks in a lifetime (860 million). 81 m 2 in area.ġ0 7 (10 million) – This brings us to a range that includes the number of steps it would take to walk around the Earth (40 million steps). On my computer screen, that image was about 18cm x 450cm =.
Let’s start off where we left off last time-ġ0 6 (1 million – 1,000,000) – The amount of dots in that huge image we finished up with last week. So for at least the first part of this post, the powers of 10 can serve nicely as orders-of-magnitude “checkpoints”.Įach time we up the power by one, we multiply the world we’re in by ten, changing things significantly. every 70-digit number is somewhere between 10 69 and 10 70, which is really all you need to know.
If you multiply 9,845,625,675,438 by 8,372,745,993,275, the result is still smaller than 8 29.Īs we get bigger and bigger today, we’ll stick with powers of 10, because when you start talking about really big numbers, what becomes relevant is the number of digits, not the digits themselves-i.e. When people talk about exponential growth, they’re referring to the craziness that can happen when you start using powers. If we wanted to multiply a number by 10, we just added a zero.īut as you advance past a million, zeros start to become plentiful and you need a different notation. When we went from 1 to 1,000,000, we didn’t need powers-we could just use a short string of digits to represent the numbers we were talking about. Today, shit gets real.īefore things get totally out of hand, let’s start by working our way up the still-fathomable powers of 10.
Last week, we started at 1 and slowly and steadily worked our way up to 1,000,000.
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