Tuesday 7 October 2008

7 Billion Dollars

A dollar bill is approximately 6 inches wide by 2.5 inches high.

The square root of 7 billion is 83666.002653407554797817202578519

From this information, it is possible to work out that if you were to put 7 billion dollar bills flat on the ground in a square grid, they would cover an area of about 501,996 inches by 209,165 inches.

There are 12 inches in a foot. So that's 41833 feet by 17430 feet.

5280 feet make a mile, so 7 billion dollars would cover an area of 7.9 miles by 3.3 miles. That's just a little bit over 26 square miles.

That, by the way, is just a little bit smaller than the island of Guernsey.
49°27'45.08"N, 2°35'7.51"W

Edit: I made a bit of a mess of things here. While working out the maths, I lost a couple of zeroes. I worked out that 7 billion dollars in $1 notes would be enough to cover Guernsey. Then it was pointed out that the number I was trying to visualise (the recent bail out given to US banks by the US government) was actually 100 times greater than the number I was working with.

700 billion one dollar notes would cover an area of 260 square miles.

That's about the size of Menorca.

Note that the picture of Guernsey was taken from an altitude of around 13 kilometres. This picture of Menorca is taken from 42 km up.

39°57'1.89"N, 4° 3'40.89"E

Currently, the world's population stands at about... well, 7 billion actually. So that's about $100 dollars each then?

But I'm doing OK, so give my share to some poor bugger in Sierre Leone or something.


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