{"id":389520,"date":"2010-03-04T13:13:30","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T18:13:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/?p=12202"},"modified":"2010-03-04T13:13:30","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T18:13:30","slug":"how-big-is-a-billion-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/389520","title":{"rendered":"How big is a BILLION? | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I love numbers. I have a decent grasp of them, including orders-of-magnitude: the idea that 1000 is ten times 100, and so on. This comes from long, long experience, especially in astronomy. Also, writing a book where the last chapter deals in practical terms with numbers like 10<sup>92<\/sup> years kinda gives you a serious feel for big numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Still, not everyone gets that kind of experience. In everyday life we deal with the number a billion, especially with computers, but honestly, do you have a real grasp of how much bigger a gigabyte is than a megabyte? Sure, it&#8217;s 1000x bigger, but that doesn&#8217;t really give you the visceral feeling of what kind of number a billion really <em>is<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Enter Jay Epperhart. He decided to figure out just what a billion means, and <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/anotherj.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/space-and-numbers.html\">put up a pretty cool page describing it<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/jayepperhart.com\/milliondot.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/files\/2010\/02\/milliondots.jpg\" alt=\"milliondots\" title=\"milliondots\" width=\"250\" height=\"250\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-12203\"\/><\/a>My favorite is the graphic depicting a million dots. They&#8217;re too small to see in the inline image, and even when I clicked it my browser didn&#8217;t display it at full resolution. When I finally displayed it in full res, the idea of just how big a million really is reached through my monitor and flicked my ear.<\/p>\n<p>That was pretty nifty.<\/p>\n<p>He goes on to talk about the number of stars in the galaxy and galaxies in the Universe&#8230; but I won&#8217;t spoil it. Head over there and give it a read. It&#8217;s <del>mega<\/del>gigacool.<\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/0TmKAY2JLATsJt067MYL-y4B8oA\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/0TmKAY2JLATsJt067MYL-y4B8oA\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap><\/a><br \/>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/0TmKAY2JLATsJt067MYL-y4B8oA\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/0TmKAY2JLATsJt067MYL-y4B8oA\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap><\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/BadAstronomyBlog\/~4\/ybuYLiMpZnA\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/DiscoverMag\/~4\/MlYwrKkPrZ8\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love numbers. I have a decent grasp of them, including orders-of-magnitude: the idea that 1000 is ten times 100, and so on. This comes from long, long experience, especially in astronomy. Also, writing a book where the last chapter deals in practical terms with numbers like 1092 years kinda gives you a serious feel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}