Assuming that you speak continuously for four hours in total (25% of your total waking hours) per day, and that your average speaking rate is 175 wpm, it would take 65 years for you to say a billion words.
A typical DVD holds 4.7 gigabytes of data. Assuming an average English word length of five characters (plus a space), using the above numbers, you could encode everything you’ve said in 51 years, in uncompressed plain text, on one.
An olympic swimming pool is 25mx50mx3m. This is a volume of 3750 cubic meters, or 3 750 000 Liters. So if you wanted to fill a swimming pool with Coke, it would take almost 2 million 2 Liter bottles. Each 2 Liter bottle contains about 4.5 liters of CO2. (From How much is inside Coca-Cola) This works out to about 18 tons of CO2.
But filling swimming pools with soda is so high-school, you say. And the two liter bottle is, after all, metric. We all know the metric system is a tool of the socialist oppressor, so it’s best if we stay as far away from that as possible. No, I’m not going to tell you how many kegs of beer there are in an Olympic size pool. (In yours, probably zero. Mine is filled with 31,450 kegs of a nice ale. Mmmm…) Ok, I lied. I did tell you how many kegs of beer there are in my pool.
Where was I? Oh, yes, liters are for commies. Red blooded Americans measure things using red blooded Americans. The average person contains 6 quarts of blood. So an Olympic swimming pool would hold the blood of 660,000 adults. That means that if you decide to become a latter day Erzebet Bathory or just want something to one up the neighbors, you could kill Memphis (Pop. 672,277) and drain them into the pool. Some of those 670 thousands are probably children or pale, so I figure Memphis is a good town to drain.
If you had a billion dollars when Christ was born and gave away one hundred dollars a day… you’d still have over nine hundred thousand dollars of your original wealth.
A billion is 1000 raised to the third power, so if you assume a standard sugarcube is half an inch to the edge, this means that a billion sugar cubes stacked into a giant cube would be about 41 feet along each edge, or the size of a squat four-story building.
Bill Gates is 50 years old. Bill Gates’ net worth is $50 billion. One billion dollars for every birthday.
Assuming Bill Gates’ net worth stops at $50b and he lives to be a hundred, Bill Gates could give away a million dollars every day and still have plenty to spare.
Wow. That’s pathetic. There really shouldn’t be anything keeping somebody from recording (at least the text) of every word someone has spoken in their entire life.