A billion is a thousand million, or 1,000,000,000 or 1 x 109.
| Amount of money requested for bank bailouts: | $700,000,000,000 |
|
| Number of visible stars in the night sky: | 9,110 * |
|
| Approx. number of stars in the Milky Way: | 300,000,000,000 * |
|
| Current world population: | 6,700,000,000 * |
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| Number of people who have ever lived: | 110,000,000,000 * |
Go outside tonight and look at the stars. Mathematically, that is $76 million dollars per star–although in reality it at least twice that dollar value because you can’t see the other hemisphere and probably have weather and light pollution affecting what you can see.
Or another way: if every living person on planet earth (including 3rd world countries) contributed $104, we’d be covered. Or if everyone who has ever lived had the foresight to put $7 into time capsule with the inscription “do not open until 2008,” then we’d be covered (not counting inflation and exchange rates, and all that.)
A great quote from Senator Bernie Sanders that I read on Daring Fireball the other day is this:
For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford — that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.
Priceless.