One billion is a large number. It's so large, it is mind-boggling impossible to understand for a human. And yet it's a pretty basic number for computers.
For example, one day is 86,400 seconds, so one million seconds is roughly 11.6 days. It's quite a bit of time, but it's an understandable amount of time. One billion seconds is crazy though: it is 31.7 years. That is a very long time, enough to go from birth to reproduction in many countries!
The Unix epoch reached one billion seconds on the 9th of September, 2001, at 01:46:40 UTC.
Having a billion $CURRENCY in the bank doesn't just make you filthy rich, nor just generationally rich. Suppose you invest rather conservatively at 3% and inflation is 2% - you're effectively growing your fortune by ten million a year in real terms. Effectively, you can spend roughly 27k per day and maintain a constant fortune.
A modern CPU has a clock speed in the range of a few GHz, meaning, the clock ticks more than one billion times per second. How many instructions you can execute per clock cycle is a pretty complicated thing, but you might just find that you're executing more than one billion instructions per second in some situations. However, accessing main memory takes about 400 clock cycles!
A modern CPU has almost one hundred billion transistors. For contrast, the Intel 4004 (the first microprocessor) had about 2,300 transistors!
Only two countries have more than one billion people: India and China. Africa as a whole has more. The whole NATO has roughly one billion people (currently...).
Your average 1 Gbps fiber optic connection transfers about 1 billion bits per second. Compressed (English) Wikipedia is about 24 GB, so you can download it in about 200 seconds or 3-4 minutes.
A modern Wi-Fi 7 can (theoretically) reach 46 billion bits per second, i.e. 46 Gbps. In theory, five seconds to transfer Wikipedia!
One billion steps is about 750,000 kilometers, or 18 trips around the world.
One billion database rows is a pretty big table, but it's really not uncommon anymore. Multiple systems I've worked on used a 32-bit counter (which is about 2.14 billion if signed, or 4.3 billion if unsigned) for the primary key in some table... and exhausted them. Twitter had the same problem in 2009.
The 1 billion rows challenge has seen people relentlessly optimize data processing to the point of being able to process a file with one billion rows of data in less than two seconds.
A system I have helped build recently at work gets used roughly a trillion times per day, i.e. one thousand billions.
One billion barrels of oil are consumed roughly every 10 days.
One billion pixels, at 4K resolution, are only about 120 frames, so two seconds of video.
The Linux kernel is about 40 million lines of code, but Google apparently had about 2 billion lines of code in 2015!
One billion (input) LLM tokens would cost you about $5,000, at today's prices for a frontier model. Output tokens would be roughly $30,000.
Apparently, humanity has not yet written one billion books - the estimates I've seen are in the range of 160 million. Though I'm sure with LLM slop, we'll reach that within a decade or two.
We do better for songs though - Spotify alone has more than 100 million tracks. There are likely about a billion songs recorded overall.