I was thinking more about the earlier posting...and trying to conceptualize what a trillion actually meant..
I can grok a thousand of something. I had some dents in my car earlier this year, and spent over a thousand of something called "dollars" to have them taken out - so let's start with that. And we all know that 1024 of something is referenced by the prefix "kilo" - as in kilobyte or kilometre or kilodollars (to repair my car).
On the radio yesterday, I heard that the average person blinks their eyes over 10,000 times a day. That seemed like a lot, so I verified it on the Internet (every site had a different answer, but Wikipedia states "actual rates vary by individual averaging around 10 blinks per minute in a laboratory setting", so I'm going to go with that).
10 blinks a minute equates to 10200 in a 17 hour day, or just about 10 kiloblinks per day. Although a bit more difficult than 1,000, I can comprehend 10,000 of something. When I go to buy a car, for example, or put a new roof on the house, I know that I'm going to spend more than 10,000 of those dollars, and am acutely aware of how long it takes to accumulate an extra 10,000 of them.
So let's use the number of times you blink in a day as a starting point to help us internalize what some of these big prefixes mean. If a day is 10 kiloblinks, how many days for a megablink? gigablink? terablink? After all, a giga seems like nothing these days - I have a doohickey on my keychain that stores 16 of them.
Well, it will take about 3 months and 10 days for a megablink. But a giga of them is a different story - if you could live for 300 years, you'd barely manage a gigablink. If you wanted to tell the world on your LinkedIn page that you've done a terablink, you'd need to start blinking when Neaderthals first showed upon the scene (something like 300,000 years ago). To get a petablink, you'd have to start so long ago that you'd see the first reptiles appear (think 300 million years or thereabouts). If you wanted an exablink on your resume, you'd have to be serious overachiever - if you started when the universe was formed, an average person would only get to 0.3 exablinks.
So next time someone tells you that consumer internet traffic has grown from 38 exabytes in 2007 to 180 exabytes this year, and is expected to grow to 486 exabytes by 2013, think on the fact that if you blinked 125 times a second, and did so ever since the formation of the universe, you wouldn't quite hit that 486 exablink number.
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