One Billion

A few years ago Dave Brouse and I stumbled upon OneBillionMazes.com. It's a site that has, well, one billion mazes. I learned two things that day:

1. That there is an absolutely foolproof way to navigate out of any maze. Apparently, Dave had learned it from Sean Connery.
2. That I truly didn't grasp the magnitude of one billion.

I wrote the following as an exercise for Sherry's class. From what she tells me, most of the kids really enjoyed it.

Let's print all of the mazes found on onebillionmazes.com! Why not? It's only a billion.

Before you start printing, please compute the following:

A) How long will it take to print them?
B) How much money will I spend on paper?
C) How much money will I spend on ink?
D) How much would the paper weigh?
E) How much room (volume) will I need to store my printouts?

Here is the information you need to compute your answers:

Paper is purchased in packs of 500 sheets, called reams.

• A ream of paper measures 8.5 x 11 inches and is 2 inches thick.
• A ream of paper weighs 5lb (2.25kg).
• A ream of paper costs $5.
• An ink cartridge costs $50
• The printer can print 10 pages per minute.
• The ink cartridge in the printer can print 800 pages before it needs to be replaced.
• Oh, and one more thing. Each maze requires two sheets of paper. One for the maze, and the other of the answer key.

A) 138,888 days, 21 hours, 20 minutes. If you started printing now, you wouldn't finish until the year 2388.

You will have dead for over 300 years.

B) $20,000,000.00 ($20 million)

C) $125,000,000.00 ($125 million)

D) 20,000,000lb (20 million pounds) which is 10,000 tons.

That is equivalent to 758 adult elephants, 5000 cars, or 22 Boeing 747 airplanes.

E) 18,036,265.4 cubic feet, which doesn't mean very much. So let's express it differently.

If the reams of paper were stacked vertically, the column would be 666,666.6 feet high, which is 126 miles. Earth's atmosphere is 29 miles high.

If you laid column paper on its side, it would reach from New York, NY to Ocean City, NJ.

If the reams of paper were stacked in a big cube, it would be 262 feet high, which is as tall as a 26 story building. If we filled every room of our house from floor to ceiling with reams of paper, we would need 600 more houses.