Okay. I was watching Kids React on YouTube and they Fine Brothers told a five year old that a clip had sixteen million views on it. That kid nearly shit himself because of the number. That got me thinking about numbers with six, nine, twelve, or more zeroes.
Obviously, million is super widely accepted as a number, and for good reason. It's incredibly prevalent in pop culture. Your favorite artist sold a million copies of their album, your favorite YouTuber hit a million subscribers, your favorite basketball player signed a three and a half million dollar contract. These are all very normal occurrences that are easily followed and usually big news for anyone following that artist or YouTuber or basketball player. So no one is really impressed by the astonishing bigness of a million anymore. Yes, it is a fine milestone, but it is really only the beginning of the large numbers. Really, it's pretty insignificant.
One thousand millions is a billion. Another ridiculously massive number that no one really bats an eye at anymore. Seven billion people on earth, eleventy billion McDonald's hamburgers sold, super rich billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Again, this number is very widely disseminated and just accepted as a vague but tangible amount. It isn't as common as a million, but it's no more impressive either, when you get down to it.
The last of the really well known massive numbers is a trillion, which is the twelve zeroes I mentioned earlier. Not a lot of things in the trillions seem real to people. Not because they aren't real, but because comprehending the hugeness of it is difficult. I personally don't think that normal people are meant to comprehend numbers this big. It doesn't have a lot of practical daily use to almost anyone. Economists that deal with the U.S. national debt, astronomers dealing with the exploration of space and classification of stars, and probably maybe biologists and scientists researching cells and nanoscopic particles are really the only kind of people that use trillion regularly. The rest of us just hear, "trillions of stars in the sky," or, "trillions of dollars of debt," and take it with a grain of salt. That is such a vague concept to most people, and it's kind of scary to think that there are bigger numbers.
Speaking of bigger numbers, they get really off putting. For example, a thousand trillions (which is almost impossible to imagine, really) is a quadrillion. That's fifteen zeroes. Written out, it is 1,000,000,000,000,000. I mean, just look at that. It's actually intimidating to see it written out. Let's skip forward a few generation to the numbers that have almost no footing in reality at all. Undecillion, for example. How many people even think that is a real number? Probably not overly many, if you ask around. That is a one followed by thirty-six zeroes. Thirty-six zeroes! Talk about intimidating! It looks like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's nearly an entire line in Tumblr's text editor. And, again, that's only the tip of the iceberg.
All I'm trying to get at is that we have names for numbers that have no right having names. Numbers that have no reality, no context, and that are generally too big for people to understand, or want to. Big numbers excite and scare me.
