Understanding ONE BILLION

A single winning ticket sold in California, hit the Powerball jackpot for just over $2 BILLION yesterday. If they take the lump sum, it’s just under a BILLION DOLLARS ($998 million). It’s kind of hard to wrap my head around, how much ONE BILLION really is. Here’s some perspective on what a BILLION means . . .

• One billion is a thousand millions. So, if you were to fill a gym with one thousand millionaires . . . collectively you’d have one billion dollars.
• One Million seconds is about a week and a half . . .
• But one billion seconds is about 37 years.
• If you were to stack 1 billion dimes, that stack would be roughly 839 miles long. The time it takes to drive 839 miles at 65 mph is 12 hours.
• One billion ants would weight over 3 tons, or a little less than the weight of an elephant.
• If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22,000 years to amass a fortune of one billion dollars.
• One billion dollars divided equally among the U.S. population would mean that everyone in the United States would receive about $3.33 cents.
• A billion miles could get you from Earth to well beyond Saturn.
• And finally . . . a billion hours ago, humans were in the Stone Age