How Long Is a Billion? Sources

A scrolling toy about big numbers

How long is a billion?

A million seconds and a billion seconds sound similar. They are not. Scroll down and every tick is one second… for a while.

Tip: press N to jump to the next marker and P to go back.

    That’s all the time there is.

    You scrolled from one second to about 13.8 billion years: roughly 435 quadrillion seconds. Along the way, a billion seconds was only about 31.7 years.

    Sources

    Every figure on the timeline comes from one of these. Years are Julian years of 365.25 days (31,557,600 seconds). Figures are rounded and introduced with “about”. Scrolling distances assume the standard 96 CSS pixels per inch.

      The time-to-scale maths (seconds, minutes, days, millions and billions) is plain arithmetic, checked against the official definition of the second.