What's the story behind this?
Read the motivation →A second is the time it takes to blink, take half a breath, or for light to lap the earth seven and a half times. It's small. It's the unit we're going to multiply by a billion.
A thousand seconds is one sitcom with the ads cut out, or the time it takes your heart to beat about a thousand times. In and out, in and out — roughly two hundred breaths.
The sun will rise and set eleven times. Starting from new, the moon will wax past first quarter and swell into a gibbous — about 39% of its 29.5-day cycle.
A billion seconds is about 31 years and 251 days. In that time the earth completes 31.7 trips around the sun — and saturn, on its slow 29.5-year lap, just barely finishes one. A billion seconds is one human, growing up.
Multiply once more and a trillion seconds reaches back about 31,710 years — past every empire, every pyramid, every word ever written. Back then ice sheets two miles thick covered the north and mammoths walked where cities stand now. It is roughly six times longer than all of recorded history.