My visualization for a billion looks just like my visualization for a million, and a year seems like a long time to start with, so I can’t imagine a billion years.
Would it help to be more specific? Imagine a little cube of metal, 1mm wide. Imagine rolling it between your thumb and fingertip, bigger than a grain of sand, smaller than a peppercorn. Yes?
A one-litre bottle holds 1 million of those. (If your first thought was the packing ratio, your second thought should be to cut the corners off to make cuboctahedra.)
Now imagine a cubic metre. A typical desk has a height of around 0.75m, so if its top is a metre deep and 1.33 metres wide (quite a large desk), then there is 1 cubic metre of space between the desktop and the floor.
It takes 1 billion of those millimetre cubes to fill that volume.
Now find an Olympic-sized swimming pool and swim a few lengths in it. It takes 2.5 trillion of those cubes to fill it.
Fill it with fine sand of 0.1mm diameter, and you will have a few quadrillion grains.
A bigger problem I have with the original is where X says “It’s really important to me what happens to the species a billion years from now.” The species, a billion years from now? That sounds like a failure to comprehend just what a billion years is: the time that life has existed on Earth so far. I confidently predict that a billion years hence, not a single presently existing species, including us, will still exist in anything much like its present form, even imagining “business as usual” and leaving aside existential risks and singularities.
Would it help to be more specific? Imagine a little cube of metal, 1mm wide. Imagine rolling it between your thumb and fingertip, bigger than a grain of sand, smaller than a peppercorn. Yes?
A one-litre bottle holds 1 million of those. (If your first thought was the packing ratio, your second thought should be to cut the corners off to make cuboctahedra.)
Now imagine a cubic metre. A typical desk has a height of around 0.75m, so if its top is a metre deep and 1.33 metres wide (quite a large desk), then there is 1 cubic metre of space between the desktop and the floor.
It takes 1 billion of those millimetre cubes to fill that volume.
Now find an Olympic-sized swimming pool and swim a few lengths in it. It takes 2.5 trillion of those cubes to fill it.
Fill it with fine sand of 0.1mm diameter, and you will have a few quadrillion grains.
A bigger problem I have with the original is where X says “It’s really important to me what happens to the species a billion years from now.” The species, a billion years from now? That sounds like a failure to comprehend just what a billion years is: the time that life has existed on Earth so far. I confidently predict that a billion years hence, not a single presently existing species, including us, will still exist in anything much like its present form, even imagining “business as usual” and leaving aside existential risks and singularities.
Excellent. I can visualize a billion now. Thank you.