Numbers quickly get very large when you start adding zeros to the end of them. The problem is that our brains aren't naturally wired to comprehend that kind of scale. And at a certain point they become these weird, intangible concepts rather than something you can actually count. Take for instance, a billion. It's a very, very large number, but, ..so is a million. I mean, they sound kinda similar so don't they kinda feel similar? But imagine this: One million seconds adds up to about a week and a half. Now I want you to take a guess at how long a billion seconds might be. -How's it going, Wren? -How long is a billion seconds? -Three weeks. - Six months? - 63 days. - Three... - You can't think of that! - Five years. - Two fortnights. - Three fortnights? - Four fortnights. - God dammit! One billion seconds is 31.7 years. Which does make sense when you think about it, because, obviously a billion is a thousand times larger than a million. So let's begin by taking about some money. Man, hey. Look what I've got here. Have you ever seen... ...a million dollars in cash? - Not personally. Woah... Oh. D- don't worry about that. How can you possibly fit so much money in a Hogwarts bag? *laughs* This is 150,000 dollars. - I only got 140,000... The reason why a million dollars doesn't seem all that imposing is because you're only looking at about 10,000 individual bills. So if this is a million dollars in cash, Can you imaging what a billion dollars in cash looks like? How big do you think that pile would be? - That's a lot of bills.
- That's a lot. That'd probably weigh this whole studio. So you might be surprised to learn that a billion dollars isn't gonna take up all that much space. Remember that show Breaking Bad? "You're God damn right." They had like, 80 million dollars worth of cash hidden in a storage locker at one point during the show and Bill Burr needed a nap. "We are here to do a job," "not channel Scrooge McDuck." But this is 80 million dollars composed of mostly twenties and fifties. So for comparison, here's a hundred million dollars composed of just 100s. This three foot tall stack here could fund an entire Hollywood blockbuster. Although throw in a second one if you wanna do marketing. So, ten of these would equal one billion dollars. And I think most people would find it pretty easy to fit that cash somewhere. But that's only because these hundred dollar bills have a very high density of value. And we have yet to see the true magnitude of the number one billion. Pretend with me for a moment and let's imagine that you are Bill Gates. And you wanted to withdraw all of your net worth, and put it into a giant stack of 100 dollar bills in your backyard. On your tennis court, for instance. Of course you have a tennis court in your backyard. You're Bill Gates. You probably have thirty. Well, it would fill the entire inbound area of the court 19 feet high. This is one hundred billion dollars. Now, a single individual bank note weighs one gram. So, a billion grams is how much this entire stack weighs. That is the weight of 170 fully grown african elephants. Or ten blue whales. That seems like it can't possibly be true, but there it is. That's the math. I checked it like, eight times. So, as it turns out, getting fake money like this in large quantities is a bit of a process. So, huge thanks to propmoviemoney.com for making that process really easy. Alright, now if we expand into outer space, we can actually start talking about distances in the billions of miles. But to put that into context, Saturn isn't even a billion miles away from us. And it takes us years to get that far away. But if we had an Epstein drive, we could do that same trip in weeks. But unfortunately, the Epstein drive doesn't exist. But it does exist on this awesone series that I've been listening to on Audible called The Expanse. Now, before I talk about that a little bit more, let me tell you about Audible. Audible has the largest collection of audio books in the entire solar system. And now with Audible Originals, the selection has gotten even more custom. Audible Originals are exclusive audio titles created by celebrated storytellers. Now, rockets are cool. I've talked about rockets before, but the problem with them is that they run out of fuel after like, 20 minutes. Now, what if you had a drive that is able to accelerate at a constant rate for pretty much, forever? That would allow you to get from like, Earth to Mars in 2 days. And this is the mechanism that allows humanity to colonize the entire Solar System in The Expanse. Humans have created a divide between the inner planets, Earth and Mars, and the outer planets, everyone who grew up in space stations and asteroids. There's a bunch of inter planetary turmoil and drama going on, but things really get intense once humanity discovers an ancient alien weapon that was sent here billions of years ago, that turns people into.. space vomit zombies. That's all I'll say. I don't wanna spoil too much. I'm on Part 7. The first one's called Leviathan Wakes. It's an incredible series. I highly recommend checking it out. And you too can start listening to this series right now if you have Amazon Prime because you can get Audible for $4.95 a month for the first three months. And of course, after that it goes back to $14.95 a month, but you still get your one free audio book every month. So all you gotta do is go to audible.com/corridorcrew or text "corridorcrew" to 500-500. The offer ends on July 31st, 2019, so act fast! You've only got a little bit more time left! I know this is like, a sponsored segment and all but like, I legitimately use Audible like, all the time. Go to audible.com/corridorcrew or by texting "corridorcrew" to 500-500. But before you go and listen to this awesome series, let's go back and talk about a billion. So how do you imagine one billion then? Well, take a look at this GoPro Hero Session, and now imagine ten of them, side by side. Well, that's easy enough. Now, expand that into a ten by ten square, and then stack it ten deep. That right there, is one thousand GoPros. Now, let's try that again, but this time, using this entire group of GoPros. Alright, now this stack is starting to get pretty big, at 12.5 feet tall. But we still gotta do this one more time because we're only at a million. One billion GoPros stacked next to each other would form a massive cube 125 feet wide. This is mind blowing to consider because lest year, GoPro announced that they had sold their 30 millionth GoPro ever. Which is a far cry from the one billion you can see here on screen. So what's actually happening here is that we're simply increasing the scale by a factor of one thousand. So a thousand times wider, longer, and taller. And thanks to the Square-cube Law, this results in a billion times the volume. Or a billion times the number of GoPros. A giant giga dollar bill would cover multiple footbal fields. However, it would only be 4.3 inches tall. Because proportionally, it would be just as thin as a regular dollar bill. I can represent a billion objects by simply scaling it up a thousand times. Which is great, because my computer can't actually render a billion things. It would explode. Again. So instead, let's look at the representation of a billion. A billion Red Bulls would fill a can the size of a skyscraper 443 feet tall. A giant Red Bull can sitting in LA is like, the most LA thing I've ever seen. A billion classic 12 inch pizzas? Well, the diameter of that would be about the size of the Eiffel tower. Bon appétit. There are about a billion passenger vehicles on the road today. And if you were to cram all of them together into one massive car, it would be almost 3 miles long. Just try considering how much metal there is in that car. Oh my God... But there's one more thing that I wanna talk about a billion of. And that is people. For those of you who don't know, we have another YouTube channel called Corridor where we do a lot of concept-based, narrative-driven short films. You might have seen our recent Boston Dynamics video where the robots actually fight back. Well, that YouTube channel recently crossed a billion views. Which is crazy to me! A billion views! And it got me wondering what a billion people in one spot would look like. Like, imagine holding a concert for a billion people. For comparison, Coachella is one of the largest music festivals in the world, with an attendance of a quarter million people. Well, let's just say each person gets allocated a spot 1.5 feet wide. It's not a lot of space per person, but it's a concert, so you're packed in there shoulder to shoulder. A billion person concert would fill not only the Coachella festival grounds, but the entire Coachella valley. A billion people would fill an area nine miles wide and cover 52,000 acres. That concert's gonna have to be pretty loud for the people in the back. I mean, a billion things doesn't even necessarily equal something that's huge! A billion grains of sand? That can fit in a box 8 inches across. And a single grain of sand is approximately the same size as a billion viruses. Bio viruses. Not computer viruses. Duh. My point is that one billion is simply too large to imagine of anything. Anyway, if you enjoyed this video, I've actually made several more videos already just like this one. Stuff like talking about the scale of our universe, to how much water there is on Earth, to what starship spaceships actually look like in real life. I've made a playlist, it's right here. You can check it out if you want to, I highly recommend it. In the mean time, Thanks for watching. Can we just take a moment and look at this?
