One Billion Seconds

Are you like me and unable to fathom what a billion looks like? I hear people talk about billionaires and can't even imagine what a billion dollars would look or feel like. It's just more numbers than I can arrange in any kind of logical order. 

If you were thinking about a billion in a numbers of seconds you would have to go back 31.71 years or to 1976 to total a billion seconds. 

A billion seconds is a lot of time but it is nothing in comparison to eternity. One could take a billion years and multiply it by a billion and you wouldn't even have a good start on eternity. 

Let me ask a few questions so you can put a billion in perspective. 

How would you like to be married for a billion years?

How would you like to have a billion dollars?

How would you like to be in school for a billion years?

How would you like to have a billion friends?

How about taking a vacation for a billion years?

How would you like to have a billion children?

A few of these may have made you break out in a cold sweat. However, I encourage you to take some time and think about your relationship with Christ and your preparation for eternity and hopefully the time you have spent contemplating a billion seconds will help you obtain a little perspective!

To calculate the number of years in one billion seconds, write first one billion in integers to make sure you don't miss any zero i.e 1,000,000,000. 

Next, we determine how many seconds are there in a year:  
1 min = 60 seconds 
1 hour = 60 min = 60 x 60 seconds = 3,600 seconds 
1 day = 24 hours = 24 x 3,600 seconds = 86,400 seconds 
1 year = 365 days = 365 x 86,400 seconds = 31,536,000 seconds 

To get the number of years for 1,000,000,000 seconds, we just divide  
1,000,000,000 by 31,536,000 

It should give us : 1,000,000,000 / 31,536,000 = 31.71 years