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 kind of
similar so don't they kind of feel
similar but imagine this 1 million
seconds adds up to about a week and a
half now I want you to take a guess of
how long a billion seconds might be I
was going around how long is a billion
seconds three weeks six months 63 days
you can't take it back five years to
fortnight's three fortnight's four
fortnight's 1 billion seconds is 31.7
years
[Music]
which doesn't make sense when you think
about it because obviously a billion is
a thousand times larger than a million
so let's begin by talking about some
money Hey look what I've got here have
you ever seen a million dollars in cash
not personally how can you possibly fit
so much money in a Hogwarts stack the
reason why a million dollars doesn't
seem all that imposing is because you're
only looking at 10,000 individual bills
so if this is a million dollars in cash
can you imagine what a billion dollars
in cash looks like how big do you think
that pile would be 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 shield
breaking bad god damn right
well they had like 80 million dollars
worth of cash hidden in a storage locker
at one point during the show and hilburn
even an app yeah hey to do a job not
shield scrooge mcduck but this is 80
million dollars composed of mostly 20s
and 50s so for comparison here's a
hundred million dollars composed of just
100s this 3 foot tall stack here could
fund an entire Hollywood blockbuster
although throw in a second one if you
want to do marketing so 10 of these
would equal 1 billion dollars and I
think most people will find it pretty
easy to fit that cash somewhere but
that's only because these $100 bills
have a very high density of value and we
have yet to see the true magnitude of
the number 1 billion butts in 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 in a giant stack of $100 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 30 well it would fill
the entire inbound area of the court 19
feet high this is 100 billion dollars
now a single individual banknote weighs
one gram so a billion grams is how much
this entire stack weighs that is the
weight of a hundred and seventy 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 prop
movie money calm for making that process
really easy alright now if we expand in
outer space we can actually start
talking about distances in the billions
of miles 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 have an Epstein drive we
can do that same trip in weeks
but unfortunately the Epstein drive
doesn't exist but it does exist in this
awesome series that I've been listening
to on audible called the expanse now
before I talk about that a little more
let me tell you about audible audible
has the largest selection of audiobooks
in the entire solar system 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 two days and this is the mechanism
that allows humanity to colonize the
entire solar system and the expanse
humans have created a divide between the
inner planets Earth and Mars in the
outer planets everyone who grew up in
space stations and asteroids there's a
bunch of interplanetary 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 want to spoil too much I'm on part
seven the first ones 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 495 a month for the
first three months and of course after
that I goes back to fourteen ninety-five
a month but you still get your one free
audiobook every month so I got to do is
go to audible.com slash corridor Crew or
txt corridor Crew to 500 500 the offer
ends on July 31st 2019 so act fast you
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 slash corridor Crew alright
texting corridor crew 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
1 billion then well take a look at this
GoPro Hero session and now imagine 10 of
them side by side well that's easy
enough now expand that into a 10 by 10
square and then stack it 10 deep that
right there is 1,000 GoPros now let's
try that again but this time using this
entire group of GoPros all right now the
stack is actually starting to get pretty
big at 12 and a half feet tall but we
still got to do this one more time
because we're only at a million 1
billion go pro stacked next to each
other would form a massive cube 125 feet
wide this is mind-blowing to consider
because last year GoPro announced that
they had sold their 30 millionth GoPro
ever which is a far cry from the 1
billion you can see here on screen so
it's actually happening here is that
were simply increasing the scale by a
factor of 1,000 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
football fields however it would only be
four point three inches tall because
proportionally it'd 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
feel like hand the size of a skyscraper
443 feet tall a giant red bull cane
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 Appetit there were 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
three miles long
just try considering how much metal
there is in that car oh my god well
there's one more thing that I wanted to
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 one and a half
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 in area nine miles
wide and cover 52,000 acres that
concerts 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
eight inches across and a single grain
of sand is approximately the same size
as AI billion viruses bio virus is not
computer viruses duh a point is that 1
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
- 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
meantime thanks for watching
[Music]
can we just take a moment and look at
this