How to make 1 billion real ?????

oss · Post by **oss** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 12:47 pm

I'm doing a project. The goal is to make the number one billion as real as possible by applying the number 1 billion to something we all can appreciate. So that we can imagine how HUGE 1 billion is.
For example: 1 billion ants head-to-tail can make a way from California to Arkansas. Or 1 billion "earth science" textbook can cover hundreds of California........
I can't come up with a real interesting topic for this project.
Do any one have any recommendation??????
Help me plz!
Thanks

deleted-71447 · Post by **deleted-71447** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 1:02 pm

How about how long it would take to write 1 billion posts on the Science Buddies forum? This one took me about 20 seconds. . .

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:04 pm

ChrisG wrote:How about how long it would take to write 1 billion posts on the Science Buddies forum? This one took me about 20 seconds. . .

Nice!

Seriously, though, I have a question for you Oss... You have several threads on the various forums. Some are about dissolving chicken bones with vinegar, some are about designing experiments correlating music skills to IQ, and now this about 1 billion. Why are you posting all these questions? We are honestly trying to help people work on their science fair projects. Every time you post a question, many experts read it, and try to come up with help for you. If you are not really interested in these topics, you are wasting our time... this time could be used helping some other students. This question about 1 billion seems a very strange topic for a science fair project, especially compared to your other questions, so I think maybe you are not interested in the science fair at all, but instead wasting our time.

Louise

deleted-71447 · Post by **deleted-71447** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 5:10 pm

I agree it is important not to stray too far from the topic of science fairs, but these forums are a little slow right now and I do not mind fielding a random question or two. I was only partly kidding about the idea of how long it would take to make a billion posts here. When you run the numbers, it does make you think.

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 6:01 pm

ChrisG wrote:I agree it is important not to stray too far from the topic of science fairs, but these forums are a little slow right now and I do not mind fielding a random question or two. I was only partly kidding about the idea of how long it would take to make a billion posts here. When you run the numbers, it does make you think.

Well, if you look at some of the posting profiles of people on the internet/usenet, I think this might be their goal!

I am interested in Oss's answer to my question though. If she/he wants to chat about a billion, fine. If she/he is just bored, well, I guess there are worse things you can do, though as I said, it does use up time.

I'm just curious about the intent. However, I'll chat about a billion either way.

So, a billion can be written as: 10^9. In my research I measure events that are 1/(10^9) of a second (10^-9 second, 1 billionth of a second or 1 nanosecond). [Actually, I measure things that are faster. One nanosecond is very, very slow for me.] Many of the important events in biology only take nanoseconds to occur!

In 1 nanosecond, light can go about one foot. So if you stand with a laser pointer in your hand and shoot it at the wall, it takes a few nanoseconds to arrive. Your eyes cannot see that fast, so it looks like there is light the instant you hit the power switch, though it actually takes a few billionths of a second to get there.

And here are some more facts about a billion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000000000_(number)

Louise

deleted-71447 · Post by **deleted-71447** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 10:46 pm

Interesting stuff, Louise. My work deals with reactions that proceed over the course of decades, centuries, and millenia.

oss · Post by **oss** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:40 am

Honestly, I just moved to the US 6 months ago from Vietnam. And therefore going to school and speaking English is no more than a nightmare for me. I have lots of problem with Science and other homework. But my Science teacher don't help me in specific things like if the topic I chose is good or not and so on. She just help to come up with ideas. So whenever I come up with any idea, I just post it on here with a hope of receiving recommendations from other people. And your help did help me a lot. I already finished with the first step of the Science Fair. I will have to continue working on it next schoolyear.
And for this topic, it's totally not involved in my Science Fair

. It just another project that I got stucked with the idea. So I really appreciate your help.
I feel so bad if I made you feel like wasting your time. Really!

deleted-71576 · Post by **deleted-71576** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:45 am

ChrisG wrote:Interesting stuff, Louise. My work deals with reactions that proceed over the course of decades, centuries, and millenia.

And I deal with reactions to medications that occur over seconds to minutes. And nothing I do lasts more than a few hours. I can't conceive of knowing patients for years, much less decades.

deleted-2574 · Post by **deleted-2574** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 11:06 am

Hi oss,

You could take an ordinary object, and show how big a billion of the articles are, ordinary household objects are fine. You might also try things like the state live in (give length), and the USA.

You might want to try columns with thousand and million to see what the results are there.

So the end result is four columns:

Object Thousand Milion Billion

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 11:24 am

oss wrote:Honestly, I just moved to the US 6 months ago from Vietnam. And therefore going to school and speaking English is no more than a nightmare for me. I have lots of problem with Science and other homework. But my Science teacher don't help me in specific things like if the topic I chose is good or not and so on. She just help to come up with ideas. So whenever I come up with any idea, I just post it on here with a hope of receiving recommendations from other people. And your help did help me a lot. I already finished with the first step of the Science Fair. I will have to continue working on it next schoolyear.
And for this topic, it's totally not involved in my Science Fair . It just another project that I got stucked with the idea. So I really appreciate your help.
I feel so bad if I made you feel like wasting your time. Really!

As long as you are interested in the topic, we will talk about it! If you are very interested in the question, then it is no waste of time for us. You understand that some people on the internet do like to play pranks like posting a lot of messages to a message board? I just wanted to double check this wasn't a prank.

I am glad you completed the first part of your project. Which one did you do? Dissolving bones or the music study?

I am sorry your teacher is not more help, but I guess maybe she has too many students to help.

Here is an interesting piece of information with billions. Walmart has decided to help the earth by selling more compact fluorescent light bulbs. These lightbulbs are the strange twisting bulbs and cost much more to buy- but they last for many years and use much less energy.

"Which is what makes Wal-Martâ€™s goal so wildly ambitious. If it succeeds in selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs a year by 2008, [snip], saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and avoiding the need to build additional power plants for the equivalent of 450,000 new homes." [1]

This is very hard to imagine- that if half the people in the US ( there are 250- 300 million people in the US) switch one regular light bulb to a compact fluorescent bulb this year and again next year, that the total energy cost saved would be 3 billion dollars. I think this is over the life of the bulb, which is about 8 years, but it is still an amazing thought.

Louise

[1] This came from a New York Times article about the plan. If you are registered at the NYT the article can be viewed for free if you search for light bulbs and Walmart.

oss · Post by **oss** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:35 pm

For the Science Fair, I finally chose the music study since I think it's more interesting to me and more practical.
Thanks for your suggested idea. I will think about it.
But I'm wondering that this project's goal is to make the number 1 billion become something real, something big and shock us. So I'm not sure if the "light bulb" idea would work.

oss · Post by **oss** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:37 pm

Oh yeah! Can we do something like: How many Earth would a billion marbles take up????

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:41 pm

oss wrote:Oh yeah! Can we do something like: How many Earth would a billion marbles take up????

Sure. You could calculate the volume of the earth assuming it is a sphere, and then the volume of a marble, assuming it is a sphere, and then do the calculation. If you have a program like Excel, it can be very easy to do many calculations... you could calculate for marbles, tennis balls, baseballs, volleyballs, disco balls

... any sphere that people might know about.

Louise

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 12:44 pm

zzzzdoc wrote:
ChrisG wrote:Interesting stuff, Louise. My work deals with reactions that proceed over the course of decades, centuries, and millenia.
And I deal with reactions to medications that occur over seconds to minutes. And nothing I do lasts more than a few hours. I can't conceive of knowing patients for years, much less decades.

Looks like we have all timescales covered then!

Louise

oss · Post by **oss** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 10:57 am

What is the volume of a golf ball or tennis ball ?????

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Fri Mar 02, 2007 11:30 am

oss wrote:What is the volume of a golf ball or tennis ball ?????

You can do this two ways-
1) measure the volume directly using the water displacement method.
2) Look up the radius or diameter of the ball, and calculate it using the formula for the volume of a sphere. You can find this information on wikipedia for almost any ball used in sport.

For example, under tennis ball:
"The ball shall be more than two and a half inches (6.35cm.) and less than two and five-eighths inches (6.67cm.) in diameter"

Louise

oss · Post by **oss** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 11:45 am

I'm having a problem. That is neither a billion golf balls not tennis balls equal to the volume of the Earth. They're way smaller than the Earth.
So what should I do?????
What are the other ideas that you recommend??

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:36 pm

oss wrote:I'm having a problem. That is neither a billion golf balls not tennis balls equal to the volume of the Earth. They're way smaller than the Earth.
So what should I do?????
What are the other ideas that you recommend??

What about the moon. Or something larger like a basketball.

How much smaller were they?

Louise

oss · Post by **oss** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 1:57 pm

Volume of a basketball is : 381.70351 inches^3
381.703 51 cubic inch = 0.006 255 cubic meter
-> Voume of 1 billion Basketball = 0.006 255 * 109=6,255,000 m3
While The volume of Earth is 1,083,206,246,123,080,894,852 m3
--> What should I do ???

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:15 pm

ChrisG wrote:How about how long it would take to write 1 billion posts on the Science Buddies forum? This one took me about 20 seconds. . .

Chris is right... this actually is an interesting topic. If you click on any user name, you can see the average number of post/ day. For example: you have posted an average of 0.86 posts per day. It would take you 3185727.939 years to make 1 billion posts.

Or you could see how many posts per day you would have to make in order to make a billion posts in your lifetime. If I were to live 50 more years, I would have to post 38 messages per minute for EVERY MINUTE to reach this goal! (That would require some really fast typing!)

Louise

oss · Post by **oss** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:25 pm

But it's pretty much depended on the length of the post.

oss · Post by **oss** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:28 pm

I'm doing a research on paper. And I found out that a stack of billion pieces of copy paper would high as much as 262 and a half the Empire State Buildings
Is it an interesting discovery ???

Louise · Post by **Louise** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:43 pm

oss wrote:But it's pretty much depended on the length of the post.

Well, it depends what you mean. Even if I sent posts with one word or one letter, I could never post a billion posts.

Obviously, long posts will take longer to type and think about, but I just calculated the rate I would have to post at, ignoring the content of the posts.

I think the paper thing is interesting too. Do you think it is interesting?

Louise

How to make 1 billion real ?????

How to make 1 billion real ?????

Re: How to make 1 billion real ?????