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How many pennies would it take to fill a cube 50 miles on a side?
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
3/27/2007 5:51 AM |
Monday may not be a good day to run this particular blog, but I’ve chosen to do so because, theoretically at least, you should be at your freshest early on a Monday morning. (You DID go to bed at a reasonable hour last night, right?)
I’ve always been fascinated with numbers, the higher, the better. Why that is, I do not know. Perhaps I was frightened by them as a child, and overcompensated for that fear later in life. I don’t remember any such event befalling me, but there must be some reason I feel so keenly about numbers, and that reason sounds as good as any other to me.
Time was, and not that many years ago either, when most people were unsure where trillions fell on the scale of numbers, but due to profligate government spending, we all know now that trillions follow billions, which of course, follow millions.
When I was a teen, I can recall reading in a newspaper that there were an estimated 400 millionaires in the United States. A few years back, I recall reading another article that said there were an estimated 1 million millionaires in the country now. I think this probably reflects more on the inflation aggravating our currency than it does of the prosperity of our citizens.
Anyway, I was talking about numbers, really big numbers. Just to touch on a few of them, in the American scheme of numbering, you have millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, then sextillions. There are more numbers of course, many, MANY more, but those will do for the purpose of this blog.
I spent some time on the Internet recently and found a site that tries to give readers a sense of the scale of really big numbers, by expressing those amounts in piles of pennies.
If you visit http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/ you can find out how many pennies it would take to equal the volume of the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower. Also, according to that site, the number I mentioned earlier, a sextillion (1021), if converted into pennies, would create a cube of coins 50 miles on each side! (Yes, that’s MILES, not feet!) Now, that’s a fair-sized number!
Another page on the site shows all the numbers up to one novemtrigintillion, which is 10 to the 120th power! (10120)
But if find these numbers to be a bit wimpy because you’re a true glutton for REALLY enormous numbers, then go to: http://g42.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=BigNumbers where you’ll find numbers so overwhelming, your stomach may begin churning, your mind will start numbing, and your vision may darken momentarily. Then again, maybe not – but the numbers you’ll find there WILL truly be MONUMENTAL! |
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