The Last Word On Nothing

How much time would you need to count to a million at the “One Mississippi” rate of one number per second?

At some point in my writing life I figured I should contemplate that question if I were ever to appreciate the kinds of numbers that astronomy uses. Knowing that our galaxy contains more than 100 billion stars, and that the universe is swarming with more than 100 billion galaxies, doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the meaning of a billion. Our brains didn’t need to evolve so that we could understand such numbers. Like cultures that count “One, two, three, more,” we tend to regard the scale of the universe—to the extent we regard it at all—as “Earth, planets, Sun, far.”

“Mississippi,” of course, is an arbitrary choice of noun. The key word has to contain four syllables in order that saying it would take approximately one second. But the key word in appreciating the profundity of the cosmos doesn’t have to be Mississippi. It’s not as if the river or state holds some intrinsic relationship to the mysteries of the universe. If anything, the word “Mississippi” is the opposite; its primordial soup of s’s, p’s, and i’s is playful, not portentous. What this exercise needs is a four-syllable noun that captures the fearsome potential of nature. Something that inspires curiosity and dread in equal parts. Something like…I don’t know…”Justin Bieber.”

So: How much time would you need to get to a million, counting at the “One Justin Bieber” rate of one number per second?

Well, let’s see. Take 60 Justin Biebers in a minute, multiply by 60, and we get 3600 Justin Biebers in an hour. Multiple 3600 by 24, and we get 86,400 Justin Biebers in a day. Now, how many times does 86,400 go into one million? Do the division and we get 11 days, with 49,600 Justin Biebers left over. Divide 49,600 by 3600 and we get 13 hours, with 2800 Justin Biebers left over. Divide 2800 by 60 and you get 46 minutes, with 40 Justin Biebers left over. So there you have it: To count to a million seconds at the rate of one Justin Bieber per second, you would need 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds.

Now what about a billion?

A billion, I think, is where our brains begin to misfire. A million we can kind of comprehend, but the notion of how to get to the next three-decimal set, I suspect, is iffy for a lot of us. So think of it this way. A billion is a thousand million. Do what you just did—count to a million—then do it 999 more times: 11 days of counting Justin Biebers, one thousand times, or 11,000 days. I’ll spare you the math. The answer is 31 years, 8 ½ months, and change.

Next: a trillion. To reach that level, you’d have to count a billion Justin Biebers a thousand times—31 years, one thousand times: 31,000 years.

We’ve now reached the scale where we can begin to push past the Sun and try to fathom the depths of the universe. The nearest star after the Sun, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light-years, or 25 trillion miles, away. That’s 186,000 years of counting Justin Biebers 4.3 times, or about 800,000 years. The diameter of our galaxy, from one end of its spiral disk to another, is 100,000 light-years. That’s 186,000 years of Justin Biebers a hundred thousand times, or more than eighteen billion years of counting, a number we can’t appreciate without first appreciating the meaning of “billion.”

Which is why, unlike Mississippi, Justin Bieber holds an intrinsic relationship to the mysteries of the universe. Our brains didn’t evolve so that we could understand the meaning of him, either.