A little workout for the number sense. It’s never easy to have an intuitive sense of volumes, but here’s a little thought experiment to exercise your numeracy chops.
Answer: around 600 million. Check my workings!
This graphic, from OurWorldInData.org (always highly recommended) shows, for a series of census years from 1851 to (projected) 2031, how many people would survive to each age in England and Wales. Things to note: the terrible effect of child mortality until 1961, and the fact that if you survived childhood, you had a significant chance of living to 60, 70, 80, even in the 19th century.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-how-is-it-calculated-and-how-should-it-be-interpreted/
IsThatABigNumber.com is about extending our number sense. We make comparisons that are (mostly) down-to-earth: populations of people and animals, national budgets, river lengths and so on.
But when we leave behind everyday experience and look at the kind of numbers you find in astronomy and in combinatorics, we come across vastly bigger numbers.
One strategy to grasp these numbers is to break them down into a series of levels, to see them as stupidly big aggregations of things that are themselves stupidly big aggregations of … Here are some good clips illustrating this: