Large numbers. That is the answer if someone asks, “what do politicians and accountants both love?” except pizza, of course. Everyone loves pizza. The politician can throw numbers into the face of the public without feeling a single ounce of remorse or fear because he knows that the public can absolutely not comprehend such large numbers. I don’t know why accountants love numbers,, though; maybe it has something to do with childhood trauma.
Getting back to the point, large numbers are incomprehensible to the typical human mind. If your preschool teacher told you there were a billion stars in the sky and your high-school science teacher told you there were a billion stars, you probably didn’t get angry at your preschool teacher for lying to you and being off by a billion times.
Or if someone told you there were a thousand grains of wheat in a single bread, and somebody else told you later there were ten thousand
grains in a single bread, you would not bat an eye, because both are the same to you Except they are not, there is a difference of 9,000 grains of wheat there. Of course, we are talking about the typical human brain dealing with day-to-day chores, not people dealing in extremely accurate and precise conditions. For example, one-millionth of a molecule would be too big a difference for a particle physicist.
So what should we do to comprehend large numbers?
National Geographic had an interesting piece on deaths in the US due to Covid-19. AA lot of people were not mortified by the sheer magnitude of the number of deaths because the large numbers were incomprehensible to them. When the US crossed 500,000 deaths due to Covid-19, National Geographic tried to make it comprehensible in the article by converting the large number into something understandable. For example, if the coffins of all the dead were lined up from head to toe, the coffins would reach from New York to Indiana. Now, this is comprehensible, and then the shock seeps in. The tragedy that is Covid-19 strikes at heart.
That is what we should do to comprehend large numbers. Convert them into something tangible. For example, the next time someone tells you the deepest point in the world in the deepest ocean is around 11,000 meters deep. You can choose to be utterly impressed by converting that into 8,500 cubic meters of water over you, which would translate into roughly 10 million kilograms of weight, which would be the weight of an entire city of skyscrapers.
Or you can choose to toss your hair aside like a teenaged girl, unimpressed with anything in life, converting the size of the earth into the watermelon, with its diameter, from pole to pole, being around 12,000 kilometers. 11,000 meters of the deepest trench will not even get you to the red eatable part of the melon. You would be stuck at the bitter white and green parts.
Ok. But how big a number is a “large” incomprehensible number?
How big can a number be called large? Studies show that the human can comprehend till a thousand. That is why most cultures and languages have vocabulary till thousand like Arabic has Alf as thousand. If you want to say a million in traditional Arabic, you say Alf Alf, literally meaning a thousand thousand, which amounts to the correct number of zeros to make a million. To say a billion,, you say alf Alf half, meaning a thousand thousands. It takes 9 zeros to make a billion,, and that is what you get with alf alf alf.
The secret answer
So the question is? How much do you really have if you have a billion dollars? The answer is the amount you can spend. What you canut of those billion dollars will get you tangible things, and those tangible things areare what yoareu can really understand. All the best spending those greens. And if you need help, let us know. We know a lot of ways you can spend money. (Winky face)
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