Mind-boggling
★ EVER wondered how many ants there are on the planet? Well now boffins in Germany have calculated that there are a whopping 20 quadrillion – or 20,000,000,000,000,000 of them.
That’s two and a half million of the critters for every human being. Biologist Dr Sabine Nooten admits: “That is 20 with 15 zeros, which is hard to grasp.”
★ But it’s not the only startling statistic around. Here JAMES MOORE crunches some other mind-bogglingly big numbers…
A single pair of rats can produce nearly half a billion descendants in three years.
Scientists estimate Earth contains 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand.
Wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill smoked a whopping 250,000 cigars in his lifetime – 10 every day.
If your blood vessels were laid end to end they could stretch to 100,000 miles, four times around the world.
A Rubik’s Cube has approximately 43quintillion or 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 combinations.
A massive 1.72trillion photos are taken worldwide every year, which equals 54,400 per second.
The average bed contains 6billion dust mites.
China produces 45billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year.
The world makes 71million cars a year. There are 1.4billion on Earth.
The world’s largest container ships can carry 746million bananas.
Brits say sorry around 2million times in their lives.
There are about 100billion stars in the Milky Way alone. The sun could absorb 1.3million
Earths.
During your life you’ll take 850million breaths. Your heart will beat 2.5billion times. in a single cough can contain 200million virus particles.
The chances of being murdered in a terrorist attack on U.S soil are 1 in 30million.
The Great Pyramid of Giza weighs 6million tonnes.
There are roughly 100million acts of sexual intercourse between humans each day.
The average Brits will sit through an eyepopping 78,705 hours of TV during their lives.
The total net wealth of the entire world comes to a staggering £310trillion.
A tasty 375billion pints of beer are drunk around the world annually.
It’s reckoned 50billion bullets were fired during World War One along with 1.5billion shells.
A Google study estimated that 129,864,880 different books have been published since the invention of the printing press.
An Airbus 380 plane is built with 4million different parts.
There are 470million pet dogs kept worldwide and 370million pet cats.
The Hungarian 100quintillion or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengo was the largest denomination of banknote ever issued in 1946. It was only worth pennies.
There are 400billion LEGO bricks in the world. Six standard bricks can be combined in 915million ways.
During a lifetime you will gobble your way through 27,000KG of food.
There are 177,147 different ways to tie a tie.
Around 1million-billion snowflakes fall every second on earth. And they are all different.
We use 13billion cans in the UK each year, enough to stretch to the moon three times.
About 117billion people have lived over the last 190,000 years. Eight billion are still here today.
Insects outnumber humans by one billion to one.
The Earth will be destroyed in about 7.59billion years.