> assuming you count once per second
One second is counting pretty slow for small numbers, but it's counting really fast for big numbers. (How quickly can you say "three hundred twenty five million seven hundred ninety six thousand one hundred seventeen"?)
And there are a lot more big numbers than small numbers.
However we're talking about counting which is not necessarily saying it out loud. You could just be pushing a button every second, or watching a drop of water fall from a pipe at a constant rate.
Anyway, I remember learning this little fact as a kid and it making the numbers (and the difference in magnitude between them) much more tangible.
For context, at a rate of 1/sec/sec:
1 = 1 sec
10 = 10 sec
100 = ~1.5 min
1000 = ~17 min
10,000 = ~3 hours
100,000 = ~1 day
1,000,000 = ~12 days
10,000,000 = ~4 months
100,000,000 = ~3 years
1,000,000,000 = ~32 yearsMy grandfather, when I was a teenager, wanted to impress upon me the vastness of large money numbers. He was wanting me to better understand how large these sums were when discussing personal wealth in the millions+, as well as how even larger such sums were when discussing government expenditures.
He made me do this same math, suggesting spending $1/second. When I calculated, and wound up with these same numbers for spending $1M & $1B--which I always rounded up to 12 days & 32 years respectively--he succeeded in cementing his point in my mind.
I have never forgotten it in over 20 years.
It takes over 31 years to count up to 1 billion.