Million, Billion, What's the Diff?

These days, it doesn't take long for numerically-themed discussions to reach the stratosphere: the thousand-thousand, or million, and beyond.





Consider these numbers:

1. Birmingham's mayor wants to spend almost one million dollars to provide [irony]free[/irony] bus rides for the summer.
2. Jefferson County's sewer system is over three billion dollars in debt, threatening to bankrupt the county.
3. President Bush has asked Congress for seventy billion dollars for the war on terror, bringing total expenditures since September 11, 2001, to more than eight hundred billion dollars.

John Archibald had an interesting column in the paper this week. He says that numbers like million and billion are tossed about with little regard because we don't have a meaningful standard to compare them with. Given a recognizable scale, such as time, puts the differences in stark perspective.

Consider:

• One million seconds: 11 1/2 days
• One billion seconds: 32 (are you ready for this?) years
• One trillion seconds: 317 (hang on) centuries

Pretty soon, we're talking about serious money...