10 Million: Put in Perspective
First published: Tuesday December 14th, 2021
10 Million Takes
First and foremost, the inspiration for this blog. I recently hit 10 million takes on JetPunk, only the 4th user to do so after Relessness, Quizzer6794 and Scambigol. It took me almost 6 years to get to this point, and I have so many people to thank for it. But none more so than those who got me interested in JetPunk right at the start, all the way back in January 2016!
In this blog we'll be putting 10 million as a number into different perspectives; prepare to be mathed! First is 10 million takes, all figures are as of December 2021.
- 10 million takes accounts for about 2.13% of all takes on JetPunk.
- If we assume an average of 40 answers per quiz, then 10 million takes equates to approximately 400 million total answers, of which we could assume at least 200 million were answered correctly!
- If we assume an average of 5 minutes spent per quiz, then this equates to 50 million minutes, or about 95 years - longer than the average human life!
- Currently, based on JetPunk's front page, 1 tree is planted every 1600 takes. Using this we can determine that 10 million takes is equivalent to over 6000 trees planted! That's a lot of wood.
Note, I plan to do a separate blog on the actual figures for the above, with exact number of answers presented and guessed, as well as time spent, by delving into the stats of my quizzes.
It seems that 10 million takes certainly accounts for a lot, and after all only 4 users have reached the milestone, so it must be difficult to attain. However, 10 million is just a number, what about looking at it from other perspectives?
10 Million Minutes
Minutes. There's 60 of them in an hour. There's 60 seconds in a minute. But, have you ever wondered what 10 million of them feels like? Perhaps it would be easiest to convert it into many units first of all, just so you can feel the scale we are talking about.
- 600 million seconds
- ~ 166 thousand hours
- ~ 7000 days
- ~ 19 years
Now we know just what the scale is we're talking about, we can start exploring what it means! For example, in 10 million minutes Jupiter could orbit the Sun 1.6 times, given the size of Jupiter's orbit this makes 10 million a rather large number. In human-terms, 10 million minutes is roughly the time it takes a human baby to journey from conception to adulthood, a very long time indeed. (Especially given many of you reading are still on this "journey")
10 Million Degrees
No, we're not talking about mathematical degrees, but temperature! Just how hot is 10,000,000°C? (Yes, Celsius is superior). Well, first of all let us convert to other units so inferior beings can understand what we're on about. 10 million Celsius is the same as 10,000,273.15 Kelvin or about 18 million degrees Fahrenheit. (You see why Fahrenheit is useless?)
A useful comparison may be our Sun, as it is often considered as one of the hottest objects that most people can refer to. In fact, the surface temperature of the sun is about 5,500°C, meaning 10 million degrees is actually about 1800x hotter than the surface temperature of the Sun.
Looking deeper, the Sun has a core temperature around 15.7 million degrees, which is only 50% hotter than 10 million degrees! So, somewhere between the core and the surface, there exists a point which is exactly 10 million degrees Celsius (thank the Intermediate Value Theorem!)
10 Million km
Ah, back to metric units. For those not familiar with superior measurements, 1 kilometer is 0.62 miles, or 1094 yards, or even 0.54 Nautical miles. So, 10 million of them, let's jump right in with the Space comparisons!
First of all, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is between 46 and 70 million kilometers from the Sun depending on the current position. Oh. It seems we've already way overshot our 10 million km, guess we need to come closer to home!
The Moon, our beloved protector of the night sky, lies about 400,000 km center-to-center. Okay, so we need to go a little bigger! The diameter of the Sun is about 1.4 million km, so we're getting closer. So, if you "walked" the circumference of the Sun, you'd have to go round about 2.3 times to reach 10 million kilometers. Of course, one cannot simply walk on the Sun, but you get the concept.
What about on Earth itself? Well, if you walked the circumference of the Earth you'd make 250 trips, that's a lot of walking. At an average walking speed, it would take you about 285 years to walk all 10 million kilometers. (Just a few more than The Proclaimers' 500 miles).
Let's talk about whales. Specifically, blue whales!
Blue whales travel between 58 and 172 kilometers per day, so let's take an average of 100 km per day. On top of this, a blue whale can live for up to 70 years, or 25 thousand days. So, this means a blue whale could theoretically travel 2.5 million km in its lifetime! Just 4 of those are needed to reach our 10 million.
10 Million km²
Now we take a skip and a hop over 10 million square kilometers. That's about 3.86 million square miles, or 1 billion Hectares.
To put this in perspective, the surface area of Earth is 510 million km², with about 149 million km² of land area. Canada makes up 9.985 million km² of the Earth's surface, which is almost exactly 10 million! So there we are, I have 1 square kilometer of Canada for every take I received on JetPunk. So much empty space...
How about some arbitrary comparisons? Well here you go, 10 million km² is the same as...
- 1.4 billion standard size Football / Soccer pitches
- 16 CARs (Central African Republics)
- 20.4 million Vatican City's
- One quarter of the surface area of the moon
- 59 Florida's
- 50 times the amount of road on Earth
10 Million Liters
Now we're onto volume, finally a 3-dimensional metric that we can actually do stuff with. Like, have you ever wanted to know how many bathtubs you could fill with 10 million liters or water? Well, the answer is about 50,000.
Perhaps you think it is enough to fill the Grand Canyon? Oh my... This is not enough to fill even 0.1% of the Grand Canyon, now that is why it is the Grand Canyon! (It actually fills just 0.00000024% of the Grand Canyon, a whopping 6 leading zeroes!)
Okay let's think smaller, for possibly the first time on this blog we're not on out-of-this-world numbers! So, what could 10 million liters fill exactly?
Well, the world's largest aquarium, the Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in China, encompasses a total water volume of almost 50 million liters. So we need to think even smaller.
Perhaps Spaceship Earth at Disney's Epcot park in Florida would work? Nope, this is actually about 67 million liters, even more than the aquarium.
I need to think even smaller, yet still notable enough that people could relate to it. Here are a few I did manage to find:
- 4 Olympic-sized swimming pools
- 63000 oil barrels
- about 0.9 times the first Zeppelin (LZ 1)
- about 100 London double-decker buses
10 Million as a Number
This might be my favourite category, we shall explore the properties of 10 million as a number! Prepare for some light mathematics.
- In scientific notation, it is written as 107
- In much of South Asia, it is known as the crore
- In Binary it is written 1001100010010110100000002
- In Hexadecimal is it written 98968016
- Its prime factorization is 27 · 57, which could also be written as 128 * 78125
- The metre was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, however this was before knowledge of Earth's not-quite-spherical shape was discovered.
- For non-mathematical references, we have a minor league baseball player called Ten Million, who played for various teams in the years prior to World War I, as well as a 2012 game called 10000000, which was a puzzle-rpg released for mobile app stores.
Conclusion
Overall, we can see that 10 million can mean vastly different magnitudes of "stuff". In some cases requiring cosmic levels of objects to compare to, and in other cases just bathtubs. Either way, I am immensely greatful to have achieved 10 million takes on JetPunk, and I look forward to what the next year has in stall for all of us!
As mentioned previously, I plan to dive into my 10 million and work out exactly how much time was spent on my quizzes, how many answers were guessed and so on. I do not know if this will work out, but if it does you'll see a blog with it all some day soon. For now though, I will be working on the JetPunk 2021 - Year in Review, as that takes priority!
Finally, here is my takes every single day of my JetPunk career. You can see a peak on April 7th 2020, and a recent low on October 2nd 2021. Someday I may hit 40,000 in one day, but for now, this we shall have to wait and see.
Congratulations :D
Either way, I'll be eagerly awaiting the 2021 Review! :)
EDIT: Reading again, it looks very impossible lol
Also, congrats on 10 million takes! It really is an amazing milestone :)
I just hope we won't now have blogs like 1256 in perspective for every single milestone of takes by JetPunk users which often appear on the RUB...Congratulation one, congratulation two, congratulation three... wait, the kettle just boiled, I'll finish the rest in a moment...