I Was Thinking . . . Billions
The recent announcement about someone winning the $2 billion power ball lottery, makes people wonder what they would have done with that much money if they had won. Buying a yacht, taking an around the world cruise, or taking your whole family to Hawaii may come to mind.
Others may think of all the good they could do with that money. They could pay off the mortgages of their children’s homes, set up college trust funds for their grandchildren and give huge checks to their church and local charities.
But whatever good intentions most people may have, winners of huge sweepstakes or lotteries often end up with a mess. Numerous cases show the big winners blow through their winnings and end up worse off than when they started. Many ended up divorced, one man had a relative hire a hit man so the relative could inherit the money, and for most, the money didn’t buy happiness. So maybe you were just as lucky that you didn’t win.
But do we even understand what a billion really means.
When you hear about building sports stadiums, naval aircraft carriers, or a government spending program, billions are discussed as if they are chicken feed. But have you ever really considered what a billion of anything is?
If you look up into the night sky, you may start to get an idea. According to astronomers, there are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. We know that’s a lot, but can we really comprehend what that means. So, let’s try to put it into some concepts we can understand.
It takes about 10 oranges to fill a salad bowl. It would take 1,000 oranges to fill the bed of a pickup truck. It would take a billion oranges to fill U.S. Bank Stadium where the Vikings play. That would make a lot of orange juice.
The Bible contains about 700,000 words. If the average person would read about 250 per minute and would read non-stop, it would take them 52 hours to read the whole Bible. If you wanted to read a billion words at that same rate it would take you 7.6 years. Remember that doesn’t take off time to eat or sleep. A stack of 1,000 one-dollar bills is about 4.5 inches high. A million one-dollar bills would be 358 feet high. A billion one-dollar bills would be 678 miles high.
Getting a billion dollars, other than winning it, would also be a difficult task. If you put away $100 per day, it would take 27,397 years to get a billion dollars. If you did win a billion dollars, spending it might be more difficult than you might think. If you just spend $1,000 every day, you wouldn’t run out of money for 2,740 years. But still, some people would like to try.
While I have a difficult time comprehending exactly what a billion really means, this fall, nature helped me make more sense of what it is. I am almost sure I raked up and hauled out well over a billion leaves.
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Photo: I was thinking Ron Albright