Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nutbutter 3908 days ago
I'm not satisfied till I see it measured in toilet flushes.
1 comments

That number would be too large to fit in an ordinary person's brain. Let's instead continually flush all the toilets in Yankee Stadium twice per minute, to see how many years you could continue to do that. Still too big. Continually flush all the toilets on Earth twice a minute instead.

So let's see... 1.335e21 L per ocean, 1.4e14 oceans per space cloud, ~6 L per flush, 1051898.4 flushes per toilet per Gregorian year, ~1.4e9 toilets on Earth.

You could flush all the flush toilets currently installed on Earth, continuously, twice per minute, for 2.1e19 years.

Still too big. That's 1.5 billion times the age of the universe. No one can truly grasp that magnitude. Let's multiply the number of Earths and try to fix the time at the approximate age of the Earth. So, divide by 4.5e9 years... There we go.

You could continually flush all the currently installed flush toilets on Earth twice a minute over the entire history of the planet, on 4.7 billion identical Earths!

Finally! A completely meaningless number that everyone can understand! ~