Man drives the length of $1,000,000,000 to demonstrate the shocking difference between $1m and $1b
Turns out $1 billion is really a lot of money
One YouTuber has gone to the effort of showing the quantifiable difference between $1 million and $1 billion, and it's shocking how much larger it is than you might have initially thought.
Money is one of the hardest things to really grasp for the average person, as beyond a certain point it reaches diminishing returns where, while the actual difference remains significant, it's simply perceived as 'a lot of money'.
Many have made the mistake of thinking that one million and one billion are a lot closer than they actually are, as while a simple three extra zeroes doesn't seem too much in principle, it actually makes a shocking difference.
YouTuber Tom Scott is well known for his fascinating experiments and tests, having previously sent garlic bread to space and tested what your toaster dial actually does, but one of his most fascinating videos shows the disparity between driving the distance of $1 million and $1 billion.
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Unlike other experiments that visualize the comparison between the two figures in volume, Scott instead proposes that it's better understood in a linear, one-dimensional fashion, which in this case is pure distance.
He has not gone as far to lay each dollar bill out flat, and instead treats it like a stack of cash that is laid sideways on the ground instead of stretching up into the sky - with each dollar roughly equivalent to 0.1093mm.
To accurately measure the distance he attached a GPS tracker to a GoPro camera, and set off on a drive until he reached the one billion target.
You might be thinking - what about the $1 million distance? That was so short that it was complete by the time that Scott had walked across the parking lot to his car, and took a measly 1 minute and 25 seconds.
To reach $1 billion in distance though? That shockingly took 1 hour, 15 minutes, and 5 seconds.
While you might think that it's not that much longer, it still managed to be 53 times longer, and the $1 million distance was exclusively on foot compared to the entirety of $1 billion being in a car, often on fast roads.
Thankfully Scott recorded the entire journey to give a true sense of how much longer it takes, and it might actually be quite a relaxing watch to sit down and enjoy the ride.
If you need another means of understanding how much bigger a billion is compared to a million, 1 million seconds would only last for around 11.5 days. Comparatively, waiting 1 billion seconds would take 11,574 days, which is around 31.7 years.
It's definitely something to take into consideration next time you're thinking about billionaires and the richest people in the world, as they really hold a wealth that is far beyond what we could even begin to consider.