Why do scientists documentaries use terms such as “one thousand billion” instead of just saying one trillion?

Question

Edit: Title should read “scientists *in* documentaries”

In: Other

Answer 1

The terms billion, trillion, quadrillion etc are ambiguous.

A thousand million or a million million are not.

The issue is that there are two ways to interpret what the higher -illions mean.

In the US you just go to the next -illion each time you multiply by thousand. The European version has the next -illion every time you multiply by a million and -illiards for the intermediate thousand times steps.

The European way simply tells you to take a million to the nth power. A **bi**llion is a million to second power. A **tri**llion is a million to the third power and **quad**rillion is a million to the fourth power. It works very well.

For the American way there is no easy way to make sense of how the prefixes and the actual numbers get together. You might say it tells you to which power plus one you need to take a thousand but that is not very intuitive.

In any case two systems exist. Normally within a single country or language the system used is clear, but when communicating across the globe in a language that might not be everyone’s native tongue this can lead to mistakes.

To avoid ambiguity scientist either simply talk about taking 10 to the nth power or when talking to lay people talk about thousands or millions of millions. It also manages to get across the vastness of these numbers better, too.