Can you? Sure you could. Theoretically, anyway. There are 86,400 seconds in every day.
If you gave yourself a second per number, this means you could count to a million in just over 11.5 days, and a billion in about 11,574.5 days—or about 31 years and 252 days.
Of course, the figures above don’t factor in sleeping, eating, or living a normal life.
So if you’d like to count only half the day and take the rest of the time off, you’d have to allow for more than 23 days for a million, and 63 years and 137 days to count to a billion.
If you lived in Great Britain, you’d have an even harder time:
An American billion is only a thousand million (1,000,000,000), but a British billion is a million million, or what Americans would call a trillion (1,000,000,000,000).
To get to that number, you could start in this lifetime, but you’d have to leave the finish to one of your descendants:
counting a number per second for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, would get you to a million million in 63,376 years and 65 days. Better get started.
