A million seconds?

Numbers are quite interesting. That is because we can't really understand them. You know what 'two' is, it's just something twice. But two million of something? It's just too big! For example, you know how long a second is. And you know how much a million is, because its just a thousand thousands, and a thousand is just ten hundreds. So therefore you should be able to know how much a million seconds is right? Just think about it for a second, how long was a million seconds ago? I wouldn't have been able to imagine how long ago it was without doing the math. It could be a day ago, it could be a week ago, it could be a month ago for whatever i know it could be a whole year ago!

It turns out, a million seconds is in fact, 12 days.
Then, a billion is an unimaginable big number as well right? A billion is just a thousand millions. So when was it a billion seconds ago? It was not last week, it was not last month, neither was it last year. It was in fact 1982! Or 31 years ago if you are not reading this in 2013.

So from a million to a billion is a difference of years! From almost two weeks to almost double my age!
And then you've also got the very very small numbers, you have probably heard of the nanosecond before. Well a billion nanoseconds ago is by definition one second ago. Crazy to imagine right? It's amazing to me because nobody realy realizes this. And all this math has allowed us to make satellites which told us that there are between fifteen and tirthy billion earth-like planets in our galaxy, and there are more than a hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe, which is just a fraction of the entire universe which might even be infinite(No edge! I might make a post about that later).

Which just shows us how huge everything actually is and how we tiny tiny humans are not designed to understand and comprehend all this, but we are designed to want to understand it. And that might just be one of the many beautiful little qualities of human beings.

[Note, in this blog I am using the short scale in which a billion is thousand millions which is used in the US more often instead of the short scale in which a billion is a million millions which is used in Europe more often]