…today’s secret…Metaphorically, how many is a billion?

Metaphors are bridges of thought, allowing us to express difficult concepts by relating the unfamiliar to the familiar.

We use metaphors all the time in helping people who want better tomorrows.

Your life is a…

battle in which everything is a struggle.
roller coaster where everything is up and down.
mountain to be climbed.

race to be won.
prison where you have no power.

I ran across these two statements recently…

“There are billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy.”

“There are billions of galaxies.”

Really? Metaphorically, how many is a billion anyway?

If you drove a car at 60 miles per hour how long would it take to drive…around the earth = 17 days…to the moon = 6 months…to the sun = 17 years (no pee breaks).

If you spent $20 per second it would take you one year and 214 days to spend a billion dollars.

It would take you 17 minutes to count to 1,000. It would take you 12 days to count to a million. It would take you 32 years to count to a billion.

You can fit 1.3 million Earths into our Sun. Sure can, it’s that big.

Our Milky Way Galaxy is a collection of stars, like grains of sand on a beach.

Our sun is just one of those stars. Our solar system is eight planets that revolve around our sun. Earth is #3 in line.

Here’s the kicker metaphor…

There are over 200 billion stars in our Milky Way with our one star being the sun. If you reduced the size of our eight-planet solar system to the size of a quarter…the size of our Milky Way Galaxy would be the size of the United States.

And, there are about 100 billion galaxies like our Milky Way in the observable universe.

So, if you think the people you are helping have some individual difficulties, think a little deeper.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this dirt-covered rock we live on is Spaceship Earth.

And, like it or not, we are all in this together.