Decades, Centuries, Millenia...?

What I want to know is what comes after millenia, what is the name for a million years? Also what comes after trillions? I know this isn’t life or death but its sort of being bugging me, I’d just like to know. So anyone out there who can shed light on this subject pleae lend a hand. If you can’t lend a hand but have a funny quip or remark then reply anyway, I could do with a laugh.

If you google “kiloyear” or “megayear” you find some people using the standard SI prefixes with ‘year’. Not very standard though. But I doubt you’ll do better.

The term eon is sometimes used in the generic sense to refer to a period of one billion years.

The term is also used as a geologic time unit which may vary from hundreds of millions to billions of years. Other time units include: era, period, epoch, and age.

Cite and more info may be found here:
http://www.palaeos.com/Timescale/timeunits.html

You can also do a web search on “Geological Time Scale.”

You realize that you jumped right from “millions” to “trillions,” and want to know what comes after that, right?

What about billions? :slight_smile:

Anyway, trillions of years and beyond is kind of a non-issue, as the universe is only 13.7 billion years old. A trillion years is equivalent to 1,000 billion years. We’ve got a ways to go before we have to worry about time scales in the trillions of years.

(If you really have to know what comes after a trillion, see the SDMB mailbag article here.)

As robby says, a billion years (10[sup]9[/sup]) is sometimes called an eon by geologists. But of course, eon also has the more vague meaning of just “a really really long time”.

There’s not much call for naming a trillion year period, since the universe is only about 14 billion years old. I suppose you might be looking ahead to the future though. Got your eye maybe on a trillion-year mortgage?

Otherwise, I’d suggest mega-, giga- and tera-year. However rarely they might be used, they’re as good a choice as anything else.

I expect we’ve spent longer discussing it’s name than anyone has spent using it :smiley: It might crop up in extrapolations… ‘heat death in…’ Otherwise, it’ll become relevant in about 985,000,000,000 years. So if this thread re-occurred once a year until then, and takes 1 minute to type, we would waste as long as the human race has currently existed typing out this question repeatedly.

I recognise the irony is taking the time to make this calculation (I just thought it was funny for some reason.)

What comes after billions? The budget deficit.