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All he’s demonstrating is that people don’t have a strong intuitive sense of what 1000 is. Time is the hardest because the units are all over the place.
It’s a lot easier to understand with volumes. A millimeter is tiny, but you can see one on a metric ruler. A cubic millimeter is just a cube of that size. A million cubic millimeters is a liter, about half a soda bottle. A billion cubic millimeters is a cubic meter, about the size of a hot tub.
"In British English, a billion used to be equivalent to a million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000), while in American English it has always equated to a thousand million (i.e. 1,000,000,000). British English has now adopted the American figure, though, so that a billion equals a thousand million in both varieties of English." - https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ex...-is-a-billion/
It's a matter of perspective on a macro scale. Take the Milky Way Galaxy for example, it has anywhere between 200-400 billion stars, but what does that really mean? If I had said 200-400 million, it would be over a 1000 times less, but still be such a colossal figure that the difference becomes practically negligible on a human level.
I don't know how much further we can go with this thread without going off on a tangent so here are a couple more:
IF you could fold a piece of paper in half 50 times, how thick would it be?
Spoiler
1/3 the distance to the sun assuming the paper was 1/500th of an inch thick per sheet.
If the earth was a perfect sphere of 25000 mile circumference and you had a string that was 25000 miles plus 3 feet long, how high above the surface of the earth, equidistant, a perfect circle, would the string have to be to take up that three feet of slack?
Similarly instead of 25000 miles the earth was 25 million light years in circumference and you had 25 million light years plus 3 feet of string, how high above the ground?
Finally, say you had a marble of one inch circumference and you had a string 37 inches long (that's three feet longer than the circumference of the marble), how high above the surface of the marble would a perfectly circular string be?
Spoiler
Amazingly, all the same of 5.8 inches. That delta r is independent of C.
2*pi* r = C
2*pi*dr = dC = 36 inches. r = 26/6.28 ~5.8 inches. Mind boggling.
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