Use Wolfram Alpha to Think About Giant Numbers
Our monkey brains have not evolved to understand large numbers unaided. Therefore, when you come across an abstract figure, it is good to have some real thing to compare. This is why I remember some statistics about the US population ; so we made a video comparing Jeff Bezos and Beyoncé’s money . Whenever you need to render a specific number, large or small, search Wolfram Alpha for it and you’ll get comparisons to some real world objects.
For example, New York uses about a billion gallons of water a day . How big is it? Wolfram Alpha says it’s about a seventh of the Three Gorges Dam.
Apple’s new headquarters cover 2.8 million square feet of indoor space. How big is it? According to Wolfram Alpha, this is 42% less than the Pentagon’s footprint.
You can also do this in reverse order. Ask Wolfram about the volume of the Titanic and you’ll find out it’s 4.633 million cubic feet. Click this picture and Wolfram explains that this is only two-thirds of Hindenburg’s volume. I knew the airship was big, but I never would have thought it was bigger than the Titanic.
If you don’t like Wolfram’s automatic comparisons, there is one thing you can do. The largest individual landowner in the United States, billionaire rancher and media director John C. Malone owns 2.1 million acres . How much land is it? 2.7 Rhode Islands, says Wolfram , or 41% of Wales. Okay, sure, but I don’t really have a clue about these land masses. Find compare 2,100,000 acres to San Francisco land . Wolfram says Malone’s land is 70 San Francisco. (Or 7 Los Angeles. )
Thanks to science journalist Andrew J. White for pointing out this trick on Twitter.