MARILYN CORNWELL: Marilyn's Photos - Nov 6 2026

I was counting from 1 by adding zeros. 1...10...100... 1000... 10000... 100000... 1000000.... 10000000. I was doing it in my head visually. So I thought I would do it on virtual paper today. Don't those zeros start to jam together? They need the commas don't they?

When we go from 1 to 10 it is very easy - just an increase of 9. Like glasses in the cupboard, or forks in the drawer. These are everyday small quantities.

Even 1 million is ok - 1000000 or 1,000,000. Lottery win that would get you half a house in Toronto. But look at 1 billion - 1000000000 or 1,000,000,000 and then 1 trillion 1000000000000 or 1,000,000,000,000. It starts to visually curve to me - like the earth.

The comparison is made in time so we can get a sense of the scale of it:

1 second vs. 10 seconds: Just a few heartbeats apart.

1 million seconds: About 12 days.

1 billion seconds: About 31.7 years.

1 trillion seconds: Over 31,700 years (going back to the last Ice Age).

It says that our human brains evolved to track physical, linear amounts - fruit on a tree or animals in a field - which is why our intuition breaks down when faced with the exponential leaps of large numbers.

There are even huger numbers that scientists work with - think quadrillion or the distance of a light-year. My focus is the billions and trillions becoming common numbers, which is what is happening with our government spending and individual worth of the ultra-wealthy.

Here's my point: how many people making $100,000 a year would it take to reach $1 trillion. It would take 10 million people. I got to thinking about the level of disparity in society - with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. I guess it came into sharp focus during the mid-term American elections.

Take our Elon Musk trillionaire with 10 million people's worth of income/money and then the 989 billionaires that Forbes says there are in the U.S. They would account for 9,890,000 people at $100,000 if each billionaire was worth only $1 billion each. We're now at almost 20 million people. Could that be some sort of disparity metric?

Anyway, these are such big numbers that I think I'll go back to counting spoons and forks in the drawers.

This popped up and made me laugh - we need some humour around the time change, don't we?