Humans struggle to comprehend huge numbers.
We've evolved brains that can count 10 pieces of fruit or 100 bushels of grain or 1,000 soldiers, but anything larger than that starts to feel fuzzy.
Take, for example, the 292,201,338 possible number combinations in the Powerball lottery.
These days, the Powerball machine sucks up five white balls from a bin of 69 balls, each with a different number. It also sucks up one red Powerball from a bin of 26 different balls.
To take home the jackpot, your ticket must have the same five white numbers — order doesn't matter — and the one red number.
If you do the math, there are 292,201,338 possible combinations. But only one can be a winner. Just try to picture that many combinations as, say, tiny squares.
Odds are that you can't.
Luckily, however, Ana Becker at the Wall Street Journal has done the internet a favor with what I can only describe as a very painful illustration.
Becker represents your odds of something as the last square in a series of squares.
The graphic warms you up with some easy-to-grasp stats, like these:
Then the graphic shows your odds of winning a $4 and $7 Powerball prize — one tiny square at the end of an array of many other squares.
But by far the most visually compelling part of the graphic is where Becker cuts right to the chase and visualizes every. Single. Combination. In. Powerball:
Yes, all 292,201,338 of them.
You really should scroll through Becker's post at WSJ to feel the gut punch, but it's waiting for you at the end.
It's the last, tiny, infinitesimal black square in the series.
That's your pick among the hundreds of millions of possible ones. You can easily see how the odds that your square is picked at random from all of the others is gut-wrenchingly bad:
So if you bought a Powerball ticket, the odds truly are against you.
But Tech Insider wishes you luck anyway.
