Edit: Title should read “scientists *in* documentaries”
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In British English until fairly recently, a billion was considered to be one million million, rather than the thousand million that Brits and Americans use now. And by the same token, a trillion was a million times that – a one followed by 18 zeroes. They were called “long scale” and “short scale.” The terms were standardized in the 1970’s I believe and the traditional American usage of one thousand millions = a billion and one thousand billions = one trillion is agreed upon now.
Still, because of that there can be confusion between what each number might mean, especially to older viewers/readers who might remember the old system. So to minimize confusion, many scientists prefer to use terms like “thousand million” or “thousand billion” to identify those numbers.
It also has a little bit of a rhetorical advantage: it’s really hard to imagine large numbers. I can imagine a million dollars in terms of things you could buy – a nice house in many areas, several very nice cars, etc. I can sort of imagine a billion (thousand million) dollars in terms of goods as well – maybe a few huge mansions, each with a big garage full of luxury cars might total a billion dollars’ value. It’s much harder for me to really imagine a number bigger than that, like a trillion dollars, because it’s so far removed from the scales at which I live or imagine. Saying “one thousand billion” might make it easier, because now I can take my billion-dollar example and imagine a thousand of those – still mind-boggling, but easier to relate to things that I understand.
The same applies to scientific extremes like distance or time. I can imagine a mile, because I’ve walked and run plenty of them. I could probably estimate one pretty well. I can imagine a hundred or even a thousand miles, because I’ve driven and flown those distances – a thousand miles is somewhere around the distance of Los Angeles to Seattle (more like 1,100 but whatever!), which is a trip I’ve taken. It’s hard to imagine a million miles. But I can kind of imagine a thousand flights from Los Angeles to Seattle. Multiply that thousand-trip 93 times more and that’s the distance from the Earth to the sun – a distance that’s much harder to actualize when you hear “93 million miles.”
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