Thinking rock7/5/2023 Let me tell you, these transistors are veeery small. So, how do you stuff two billion transistors inside a square that fits in the palm of your hand? The answer is pretty obvious: to stuff an unfathomable number of objects into a small space, you just make the objects in question unfathomably small. With that in mind, the fact that this same paper stacked two billion times is taller than 112 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other should hopefully drive home the magnitude of two billion. If I stacked 100 pieces of this paper, the resulting pile would only be 5 centimeters or 1.97 inches tall. I want to stress that this printer paper is the thinnest stuff that you can buy. Everests on top of each other, and it still wouldn’t be as tall as this stack of paper! It’s quite literally halfway to space! Put another way, you could stack 5 and a half Mt. That’s 4.3 times taller than the maximum height commercial planes fly at. If I were to assemble a stack of two billion pieces of the thinnest printer paper I could find, the resulting tower reaches 50 kilometers or 31.07 miles into the air. So, let’s make it a little more tangible. Written out, two billion is 2,000,000,000 – even after writing out all nine of those zeros, the concept is still abstract. The semantics of saying “two billion” obfuscates the magnitude of the number. Numbers at this magnitude are really hard to fathom. A short aside on size and the thinking rockĭepending on the device you’re reading this post on, your thinking rock has around one to two billion (or more) transistors stuffed inside it. Modern thinking rocks have fancy tricks to make these and other more advanced mathematical operations go faster, but essentially all a thinking rock does is very speedy addition all day.
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