How Much Is a Billion?

My high-school physics professor had a webpage dedicated to this question. I wanted to rattle on about it here.

From a recent Yahoo article: the missile defense shield is “likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over coming decades.”

Most people, I think, can’t conceptualize a million dollars, let alone a billion. Most calculators won’t even go higher than 99 million — eight digits. Here’s an attempt.

A fine car runs about $25,000. For $1 billion, you could buy 40,000 cars. That’s roughly one full year of every Land Rover sold in the US. Times 100: missile defense system, or the entire US production of automobiles for a year?

A brand-new house: $250,000. For $100 billion — four hundred thousand houses, possibly enough for a million people. In a third-world country, comfortable food and housing for life might cost $10,000 per person — so $100 billion would cover ten million people, for life.

If you make $50,000 a year, it would take you thirty thousand years to earn a billion dollars. Thirty thousand years ago is roughly when modern humans began to roam the earth.

If I’ve slipped a digit anywhere in these calculations, don’t bother to tell me, because that’s my point anyway.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Build a multi-billion dollar weapons system and point it at him, and — he’ll probably resent you even more for not just sharing your fish with him in the first place.