The True Scale of a Billion

I watched Avatar today, in preparation for a likely weekend trip to see Avatar 2: The Way of Water at the weekend. Both films have now taken over US$2 billion dollars. As making over a billion at the box office is now commonplace, it’s worth considering the difference in scale between 1 million and 1 billion and from there to 1 trillion.

Easiest thought of by comparing seconds of time.

Number of seconds		Duration
10^0 seconds	1 second	1 second
10^1 seconds	10 seconds	10 seconds
10^2 seconds	100 seconds	1 minute, 40 seconds
10^3 seconds	1,000 seconds	16 minutes, 40 seconds
10^4 seconds	10,000 seconds	2 hours, 47 minutes (approx.)
10^5 seconds	100,000 seconds	1 day, 4 hours (approx.)
10^6 seconds	1 million seconds	11 days, 14 hours (approx.)
10^7 seconds	10 million seconds	115 days, 18 hours (approx.)
10^8 seconds	100 million seconds	3.1687 years
10^9 seconds	1 billion seconds	31.69 years
10^10 seconds	10 billion seconds	3.169 centuries
10^11 seconds	100 billion seconds	3.169 millennia
10^12 seconds	1 trillion seconds	31,689 years

If you earned a dollar per second, you would have your first million after just 11 days. It would take you almost 32 years to get to your first billion at the same rate.

Movies that have taken over $2 billion have made serious money whichever way you calculate it.