The short answer is no, probably not. Unless there are major improvements in health and a tripling of the current average lifespan I won’t make it to 220 years old, which is 7 billion seconds. That’s how big a number 7 billion is.
With so much focus recently on the world’s population reaching 7 billion people, we wondered: 7 billion people is a huge number. It is such a big number that we can’t really comprehend exactly how much it is. With that in mind, we present some examples that put the number in context. If you have any other ways to better conceive of 7 billion, let us know.
- Seven billion M&M’s would almost fill three Olympic-size swimming pools.
- Americans consume 7 billion bananas, the nation’s most popular fruit, roughly every four months.
- When you are between 31 and 32 years old, you will have lived for 1 billion seconds. To reach 7 billion seconds, you would have to live to be 220 years old!
- If you stacked up 7 billion sheets of copy paper, the stack would be 504 miles high — about the distance to the international space station and back again.
- The Earth measures 24,900 miles around the middle. To travel 7 billion miles, you would have to circle the globe nearly 300,000 times.
