One of the foremost media people and scientists in our lifetime has been Carl Sagan, who brought the universe and its wonders to TV audiences everywhere. One of his hallmarks was the phrase "Billions and Billions", resulting from the way he said "billions". He said it with an increased emphasis on the "b". There was a good reason why he did it, and that was illustrated by an incident on the stock market on 2002 October 2, Thursday.
On that day the averages ambled about the zero line all day, then suddenly tumbled at the end of the day for a loss. Maybe there were economic factors involved, but something else happened that could have caused much of that drop. Bear Stearns, Inc input an order to sell four million shares of stock. Now some misunderstanding of human voices, perhaps over the telephone must have occurred. It was not a computer error. Somehow it got entered in as four billion shares of stock. That is an enormous number, and that would influence the averages. Someone caught it and halted all but $622 million of the sale.
It is clear now why Sagan said "billions". He wanted to distinguish "billion" from "million". The two sound alike but are vastly different in size. A billion is 1,000,000,000 (in America, that is). A million is 1,000,000, or a thousand times less. They sound alike; in fact, "m" and "b" are relatives of each other, along with "p". All are made by parting the lips. So I can understand how "million" sounded like "billion". This means of course that the error was one involving the human voice.
We should learn the names of large numbers and know how big they are. Here is a table:
| thousand | 1,000 |
| million | 1,000,000 |
| billion | 1,000,000,000 |
| trillion | 1,000,000,000,000 |
| quadrillion | 1,000,000,000,000,000 |
There are names beyond these, such as quintillion, sextillion and so forth, and one can go to a web page of large numbers to see them all. But, as I show below, these are rarely used. Learn these numbers and these names, and say them properly. Also take into consideration the country you are in - in Great Britain and some other places, a billion is 1,000,000,000,000. This will help avoid errors that result from mistaking a million from a billion.
The Quadrillion Principle
This principle asserts that quantities that we use in everyday life and usage cannot exceed a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000. This explains why "trillion" is frequently used in our society, but "quadrillion" is much rarer, and "quintillion" and higher numbers are almost never heard of. The reason is this. The gross world product is somewhere near $10 trillion. The smallest unit that we work with is a penny. $10 trillion are a quadrillion pennies. This is the maximum amount we can conceive in terms of the minimum. It follows that all other quantities in our life must fall between these and be less than a quadrillion. For example, the number of rabbits in the world must be less than a quadrillion. For a rabbit is worth greater than a penny, maybe $10 or $100 or so; certainly it takes more than this to feed it. Further, the total worth of all the rabbits in the world must be less than the GWP. For otherwise, we would catch and buy up all the rabbits to increase the worth of everything. Therefore the total number of rabbits is less than their total worth, which in turn is less than the GWP which is a quadrillion pennies. So the number of rabbits is less than a quadrillion.
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