Imagining a fortune!

When I'm confronted by huge numbers - say, of money or people - it's very difficult for me to imagine what it might look like.  So if I'm told that there were 10,000 people at an event, or that my town has 35,000 inhabitants, it means nothing to me.  I can't 'see' that number.  Most of us are probably the same in that respect.

One of the things I like to do, therefore, is to create a context - or convert the number to something more comprehensible.  For instance, when I moved from one flat to another a few years ago, I calculated the number of stairs I'd gone up and down (I naturally counted all the trips) and worked out that I'd gone up the height of Ben Nevis (highest mountain in the British Isles) and down again that day!

Then, the other day, we heard that Jeff Bezos - the Amazon plutocrat - was briefly the richest man in the world with an estimated personal fortune of $90 billion (why briefly I don't know - unless he went out that afternoon and bought a country or something!)  So, that's $1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 x 90.  A hefty stack of dough.  That still didn't enable me to visualise it, though.  So I tried to figure out, if that was all in $1 bills and they were put into bundles of $1,000 each, and those bundles were then stacked one on top of the other - how high would the stack go?

A dollar bill is 0.0043" thick.  So a bundle of 1,000 would be 4.3" thick... and 1,000 of those bundles - a million dollars - would be 4,300 inches.  Or 358.33 feet.  Or 119.44 yards.

A thousand times that (a billion dollars) would therefore be 4,300,000 inches.  Or 358,333.33 feet.  Or 119,444.44 yards.  Or 67.86616161616162 miles.  That's roughly the distance, as the crow flies, from London to Margate.  Multiply that by 90, and Bezos's stack of dollar bills would be 6107.954545454545 miles high.

I can't imagine that height - so, laying that stack flat, that would be pretty much the distance (again, as the crow flies) from London to Bangkok.  But that's still not something I can really imagine.  So I'll break it down into cubic capacity.  A dollar bill is 2.61" wide  x 6.14" long.  6107.954545454545 miles is 387,000,000 inches, or 10,750,000 yards.   I won't go into the stages of the calculation, but it equates very roughly to a 50-yard cube of $1 bills.  150 feet in height, width and depth.

Still hard to imagine?

Okay.  Here's the London tower block I lived in when I was in my early teens.  It was 150 feet high by 75 feet wide and deep.

Four of those, put together!

 

  

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