Billions

One billion is a large number. It's so large, it is mind-boggling impossible to understand for a human. And yet it's a pretty basic number for computers. For example, one day is 86,400 seconds, so one million seconds is roughly 11.6 days. It's quite a bit of time, but it's an understandable amount of time. One billion seconds is crazy though: it is 31.7 years. That is a very long time, enough to go from birth to reproduction in many countries! The Unix epoch reached one billion seconds on the 9th of September, 2001, at 01:46:40 UTC. Having a billion $CURRENCY in the bank doesn't just make you filthy rich, nor just generationally rich. Suppose you invest rather conservatively at 3% and inflation is 2% - you're effectively growing your fortune by ten million a year in real terms. Effectively, you can spend roughly 27k per day and maintain a constant fortune. A modern CPU has a clock speed in the range of a few GHz, meaning, the clock ticks more than one billion times per second. How…