# Is it just me or do you want to strangle people who use the phrase"Hundreds of billions of yearsold" **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [July 26, 2017, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157 "2017-07-26T14:02:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jonpluc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/fbc32d/32.png) [@jonpluc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jonpluc)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/1 "2017-07-26T14:02:58Z")
i hear this or a similar variant in conversations in passing all the time when someone wants to say that something happened a long time ago and they casually state a number that is exponentially years before the Big Bang. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/2 "2017-07-26T14:41:33Z")
> [@jonpluc](#): > > i hear this or a similar variant in conversations in passing all the time when someone wants to say that something happened a long time ago and they casually state a number that is exponentially years before the Big Bang. What about hundreds of trillions or even gazillions of years old? ---
**Author:** ![Morgenstern](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Morgenstern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgenstern)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/3 "2017-07-26T14:50:37Z")
The only person I really want to strangle now is that fat little fucker in North Korea. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/4 "2017-07-26T14:59:00Z")
Even worse are people who use the phrase “trillions of light years”. The universe ain’t that big! ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/5 "2017-07-26T15:00:38Z")
Who’s saying that? I’ve never heard it. I would have noticed. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/6 "2017-07-26T15:13:09Z")
Can’t say that I’ve noticed people ever using the phrase. I’m annoyed by people using stupidly inaccurate numbers to indicate long distances, though, such as saying something about aliens from a million miles away (barely past the Earth) or going too far in the opposite direction and saying a million light-years away (in intergalactic space.) ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/7 "2017-07-26T15:52:23Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#): > > The only person I really want to strangle now is that fat little fucker in North Korea. You can’t – unless your fingers are real fucking long. That bastard is a real tubby. ---
**Author:** ![BubbaDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bubbadog/32/333_2.png) [@BubbaDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BubbaDog)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/8 "2017-07-26T16:01:33Z")
I can’t get angry about this. I’ve yet to let go of the hate for the use of the word Nuke-You-Ler. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/9 "2017-07-26T16:05:05Z")
> [@jonpluc](#): > > i hear this or a similar variant in conversations in passing all the time when someone wants to say that something happened a long time ago and they casually state a number that is exponentially years before the Big Bang. Tom Holt (the British comic fantasy/SF writer) has a habit of referring to inappropriately large time scales in his books, which sometimes irritates me, because the times he gives (for example) imply that the dog species originated 100 million years ago, which is way, way off (100 million years ago was the middle of the Cretaceous). ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/10 "2017-07-26T16:07:03Z")
Never in a million years have I been less upset about someone’s exaggeration. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/11 "2017-07-26T16:11:10Z")
Are they american billions or normal billions? ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/12 "2017-07-26T16:14:44Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Are they american billions or normal billions? Must be metric billions. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/13 "2017-07-26T16:23:13Z")
My favorite example of this is when Superman got frozen to “one thousand degrees below zero” on the original TV show. I always wondered if that was Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/14 "2017-07-26T16:44:27Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Even worse are people who use the phrase “trillions of light years”. The universe ain’t that big! [It might be.](https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5476) > [@](#): > > Bayesian model averaging is a procedure to obtain parameter constraints that account for the uncertainty about the correct cosmological model. We use recent cosmological observations and Bayesian model averaging to derive tight limits on the curvature parameter, as well as robust lower bounds on the curvature radius of the Universe and its minimum size, while allowing for the possibility of an evolving dark energy component. Because flat models are favoured by Bayesian model selection, we find that model-averaged constraints on the curvature and size of the Universe can be considerably stronger than non model-averaged ones. For the most conservative prior choice (based on inflationary considerations), our procedure improves on non model-averaged constraints on the curvature by a factor of ~ 2. The curvature scale of the Universe is conservatively constrained to be R\_c \> 42 Gpc (99%), corresponding to a lower limit to the number of Hubble spheres in the Universe N\_U \> 251 (99%). ---
**Author:** ![BobBitchin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7ea924/32.png) [@BobBitchin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobBitchin)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/15 "2017-07-26T17:50:01Z")
I can’t say I want to strangle them, I just classify them as stupid children, who shouldn’t be listened to. Like people that say “I’m a million percent sure” or “irregardless”😃 ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/16 "2017-07-26T20:21:53Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > My favorite example of this is when Superman got frozen to “one thousand degrees below zero” on the original TV show. I always wondered if that was Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin. [Innumeracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29) comes in all orders of magnitude. There was an episode of Star Trek where Spock mentions some supposedly humongous number as “one to the thirtieth power”. (Easy to imagine script writers writing that. Harder to imagine Nimoy failing to catch that.) It’s well known that people, by and large, don’t comprehend numbers that involve huge or miniscule orders of magnitude. This is most serious in the areas of economics – How many people can comprehend the real impact, for example, when Trump rails about the millions (billions? gazillions?) of dollars the [military spends on medical care for transgender people](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/us/politics/trump-transgender-military.html). Or how small a pittance is that [Food Stamps budget of $70.9 billion a year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistance_Program)? ---
**Author:** ![Icarus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/icarus/32/72_2.png) [@Icarus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Icarus)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/17 "2017-07-26T20:39:47Z")
> [@jonpluc](#): > > i hear this or a similar variant in conversations in passing all the time when someone wants to say that something happened a long time ago and they casually state a number that is exponentially years before the Big Bang. You really want to strangle someone for that? Maybe cut back on the caffeine. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/18 "2017-07-26T21:09:58Z")
It is irritating but not nearly so much as the grotesque use of “It’s in our DNA” to indicate a principal quality or comptency by people who don’t actually understand what DNA is. For a while, I had to deal with a representative of a three letter agency who literally used this phrase two or three times in an hour long weekly call, and it really made me want to lecture him on what DNA is and why it is a stupid metaphor. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/19 "2017-07-26T22:02:39Z")
That ain’t nothin’. In the Hindu cosmology there are cycles of [hundreds of trillions of years.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time) ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2017, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157/20 "2017-07-26T22:15:33Z")
Back in 2010, I was looking for work and kept seeing jobs where they were looking for people with 5 years experience with Windows Server 2008. So, I feel your pain, in a microcosm. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-just-me-or-do-you-want-to-strangle-people-who-use-the-phrase-hundreds-of-billions-of-yearsold/792157.md?page=2)