What's in a number?

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Nowadays all the politicians, from Obama, to Harper, to Campbell, talk so easy about billions or trillions of dollars for this or that..

To understand the magnitude of a billion and a trillion, lets put them in time terms:

By the Numbers:

One billion figure is 1,000,000,000 ( nine zeroes)

One trillion figure is 1,000,000,000,000 ( twelve zeroes)

One billion minutes is about 1,902 years

One billion minutes ago Jesus was alive

One billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age

One trillion seconds equals to 32,000 years

One trillion minutes is about 1,901,369 years. It was the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, Earth was covered with ice

One trillion hours ago our direct ancestors were rat-like nocturnal insectivores hiding in cozy daytime burrows from allosaurs and raptors. It was the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs were at their most diverse. Africa and South America just separated, forming the Atlantic Ocean.

One trillion days ago there were no animals at all, but bacterial collectives had begun working together in communities that that would one day be called protozoa. It was the Archean geologic eon. There was virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere, the sun was 1/3 dimmer than it us now, and life consisted of non-nucleated single-celled organisms.