Are you this ignorant?
"You can’t spend a billion dollars in a lifetime."
Paul Allen, you have heard of him I am sure, another billionaire. Not only spent a billion dollars in his life time. He was spending a billion dollars a year on a pet project up until his death.
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Jeff Bezo's is spending at least a billion dollars a year on Blue Origin.
For all your examples on how to understand how much is a billion dollars you get it all wrong. You try to make a billion dollars sound like an unbelievably large amount of money. It is not. It is not enough money to do many things that need to be done.
UNICEF raises 7 or 8 billion dollars each year and spends it trying to help as many of the worlds children as they can. Spending a billion dollars is easy for someone with good organizational skills.
I used to manage million dollar a year research projects. Yes, if I had access to a billion it would not have been hard to spend it.
How much does it cost to find a Higgs Boson (the God particle)?
More than 5 billion dollars a year.
Do you see a pattern here, single digit billions is the normal price for big time projects. I could list a very large number of projects that are funded at a billion dollars a year. A Space Shuttle Launch cost about a billion dollars a pop. The James Webb Space Telescope will cost at least 10 billion dollars.
The U.S. debt is between 25 and 30 trillion dollars. 30,000 billion dollars. If you can't fathom these numbers, grasp them, how can you provide meaningful contributions to the decision that voters must make when they vote to elect the officials or vote on the policies that are before them.
If you are looking for a number that is too big to put in perspective here is one, the number of atoms in one ounce of gold is 3.36x10^27 atoms. That is many trillions of billions.
Carl Sagan on his TV show talked about big numbers and explained a googolplex. That is an inconceivable number.
TEK
