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Comment by jeanlucas | Hacker News Reader

One million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is 31 years.

Thanks! But same here imho:

              1,000 seconds =          ~0.01 days (~17 min)
          1,000,000 seconds =         ~11.57 days (~12 days) 
      1,000,000,000 seconds =     ~11,574.07 days (~32 years)
  1,000,000,000,000 seconds = ~11,574,074.07 days (~32k years)

It all seems quite logical once you put everything into the same unit, I think.

Maybe it's just our human calendar/time unit rollercoaster (60*60*24*30*12) that's playing tricks on us here.

Of course it is logical, we are not discussing the math.

But it isn't intuitive, you're not used to numbers that big or that grow that fast.

Few things go from a million to a billion, especially when related to time.

It’s the units that make it seem unintuitive. 12 days is roughly 0.032 years, and 17 minutes is likewise 0.000032 years. It’s relative to how we were taught to view smaller lengths of time. Of course you could argue measuring time by the rotation of heavenly bodies is more intuitive than counting on your fingers for the hours in a day and days in a lunar cycle.

Going from a million to a billion isn't some special relationship. It's just * 1000. It's the same as going 11000 or 101000.

I find it frustrating that people seem to think that someone going from 1M to 1B is somehow different to other numerical operations. It's not. It's 1000 times bigger, it's not a huge deal.

And any exponential growth is also a multiplication, it's not a big deal, just giving example on what they asked before.

Somehow people are interpreting this as some kind of math trick.

It's not a trick, our brains are not wire to deal with numbers growing quickly, but we do understand the math.

Only abstractly. If you are living in the process, it is hard and very few people live that.

Which process, though? Every human alive easily went from millions of cells to billions of cells to trillions of cells.

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