Lotsa Part II

A week ago I posted a piece called "Lotsa," where I talked about the difficulty non-science (not to be confused with "nonsense") people have with large numbers. Most people would have difficulty distinguishing the meaning and the reality of 700 million versus 700 billion. Those of us who have spent time with large magnitudes know immediately that the difference is a factor of 1000. A dollar won't buy me a cup of coffee (though it will buy me a refill). A thousand dollars will buy me two months rent and electricity with enough left over to buy a cup of coffee each day for a month. That's not a trivial difference.

One way to internalize the meanings of "lotsa" of various magnitudes is to convert the numbers to something you can visualize- even if it's an absurd representation, the process of picturing what 700 billion dollars means can help one come to some comprehension of it. That is not to say you really understand it in human terms, but you have some abstract way to relate to it. I cannot in a meaningful way grasp the magnitude of 4.6 billion years, but I can relate it to other periods of time that are meaningful to me. For example, there are approximately 31.5 million seconds in a year. So if I could live one second for every year the earth has existed, I would survive about 146 years. All of human history (the last 10,000 years) would pass in the last 2 hours and 47 minutes of my life. I could make some snarky comment about those not being the most pleasant three hours of my 146-year life, but I won't.

So to get back to the idea of 700 billion dollars, I had been toying with the idea of converting that into some sort of physical imagery, as the author of the original article on a billion McDonald's hamburgers had done. But someone beat me to it. See here and here.

Some examples:

• Laid end to end (as dollar bills) $700 billion would "Stretch from the Earth to Venus (the next closest planet at approximately 25,476,219 miles from Earth at its closest approach) over two and a half (2.66) times."
• The weight as dollar bills would be "Slightly less than eight (8) Nimitz class aircraft carriers (each one is approximately 97,000 tons)."
• The area covered by that amount would be "Almost twice (1.81) the total area of Rhode Island (1,545 square miles)."
• $700 billion would have a volume "Almost three quarters (0.71) the size of the Hoover Dam (39,240,000 cubic feet)."

See the linked blog for a number of other great examples.

I am not against the bailout plan; it will almost certainly be necessary to stave off much worse consequences. I'll even go so far as to say that I feel like I more or less understand the causes of the situation. But I have no freaking idea where this 700 billion number came from. As a person who has a symbolic sort of understanding what a ginormous version of "lotsa" that number is, that makes me very, very uncomfortable. I mean, we're throwing 8 Nimitz-class carriers at the problem. Why not seven? Or nine?