Orders of magnitude for the layman

Factual Questions
1

I turn to our brilliant Dopers to help me out with an aspect of my job. I’m trying to figure out how to express certain numbers of people in a way that a layman can wrap his head around easily.

For example take the following approximations:

A large stadium holds 100,000 people
New Years Eve in Times Square attracts 500,000
NYC has a population of 8 million
NYS has 19 million
USA has 280 million
The world has 6 billion
The total number of people that have ever lived is 100 billion.

Any better ways of conceptualizing numbers from a hundred to a trillion? I’d rather have it be a mass of people in one place than something vague, like the number of people who watch Joe Millionaire. Also, anything that is New York City-based gets bonus points.

And I’ll give extra credit to anyone who can describe numbers greater than a trillion for anyone lacking expertise in atomic particles. For example, the number of stars in the universe is estimated to be around 10[sup]21[/sup] or so.

Any and all help is appreciated.

2

I know this isn’t what you’re looking for, but my Dad taught me to understand the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion like this:

A million seconds is about 11 days.

A billion seconds is about 31 years.

And a trillion seconds ago, that is, 310 thousand years ago, there was no TV.

Well, I was only 7 years old.

3

The Union Square subway station has one trillion rats.

4

Actually, a trillion seconds is 31,546years.

A trillion minutes is ~1.9 million years.

One way (that might appeal to NY’ers) is to estimate is how much snow would you have if a trillion snowflakes fell. You must assume a size for a snowflake of course, we"ll say a snowfalke is roughly a sphere with a radius of 0.5 mm, OK?

then:

1 trillion snowflakes is then 523,598,333 cm[sup]3[/sup]

using 0.061 in[sup]3[/sup] per cubic mm gives

31,939,498 in[sup]3[/sup] divide by 144 (cubic inches in a cubic foot) to get
221,802 ft[sup]3[/sup]

So that would be a foot of snow on a 470 by 470 foot area.

Or, everyone loves money, right?

$1 trillion is $125,000 for each of the 8 million New Yorkers.

5

The best analogy I have heard for a googoolplex (10^(10^100)) is that if you had a magical window that opened up to a different, random universe each time, it would take roughly a googoolplex years of opening the window before you saw a universe which was exactly like our own in every detail, assuming you open the window once every second or so.

6

You can view 1000 dots on a page very easily. You can also view 1,000,000 if the page is big and of high printing quality. A thick book of such pages holds 1,000,000,000 dots.

Note that among the English speaking people the meanings of million, billion and trillion differ - I think American billion = 1,000,000,000 = English trillion.

Yesterday a bookkeeper asked me to tell them what $11,110,550.00 was bu writing it and showing me the page - she didn’t know how to say it and didn’t know it was “about eleven million dollars” (we’re American).

7

It used to be that an English billion was 1,000,000,000,000. Nowadays, the American billion seems to have taken over. I don’t know what an English trillion was - presumably add six more zeroes.