It seems as if all we talk about in this country nowadays has to do with budgets, money, expenditures and bottom lines. With that in mind, think about a billion dollars. If you’re like me, you can think about a billion dollars all you want but you’ll never be able to visualize it.

Back in 2008, wallstats.com talked about this very thing: trying to visualize one billion dollars. They pretty much acknowledged the exercise is futile. They noted you can say certain things like the following:

One billion credit cards would weigh as much as 78 brachiosauruses. (I think you’d agree with me that the comparison isn’t all that helpful, especially if you didn’t know that there was such a thing as a brachiosaurus.)

Or this: one billion pennies would cover 14 square miles.

Still, it’s pretty hard to appreciate how much a billion of anything is by using brachiosauruses and square miles. I get a better grasp of a billion dollars by this wallstats.com example: You are a Ph.D. as are 278 of your friends. Add up all the money all of you make during the 40 years or so of your careers and that’s a billion dollars. This one from aworldofprogress.com in 2011 drives the point home even better for me: You make $29,000 a year and don’t spend a single penny of it; it will take you 34,482 years to save a billion dollars.

What got me to thinking about large amounts like a billion dollars is all the pink that has been hitting my eyes of late. Sports teams have been wearing pink helmets, pink wristbands, pink socks and pink this and that, all done in support of breast cancer. Pink is in for a good cause but it strikes me that where a cure for cancer is concerned all I can do is essentially go on what others say about it, much like somebody trying to school me on what a billion or trillion dollars looks like.

Does anybody know how many billions of dollars have been spent on cancer research since, say, 1950? An online search shows that in 1997 Penthouse magazine contained an article, “The $200 Billion Scam,” which seems pretty self-explanatory from the title. I’m not certain how Penthouse arrived at that $200 billion figure back then or if Penthouse would be considered by many to be an appropriate medium by which to question what’s going on in cancer research. Whatever, at least the magazine put a dollar figure, right or wrong, on the money collected by walking, running and donating as individuals and the millions and billions that come from the government, foundations, philanthropists and the like.

Me, I’m like most people where cancer is concerned: It’s a reality; it’s scary; it’s an accepted part of life, though not a desirable part. Still, I can’t help but ask the question about how much more money will be needed to beat this disease. I trust that doesn’t make me sound anything but sympathetic since sympathetic I am. I’ve lost a father, grandfather, grandmother and great grandmother to the disease and, as I write this, my wife has a relative in a life and death struggle with cancer. Yet, if you tell me a billion dollars would allow me to stay in a $20,000 a night hotel room every night for 137 years, I have to say wow! That’s a lot of money! Multiply that 200 times, 500 times or a thousand times. You can’t help but ask what’s going on in the world of cancer research or how much more it’s going to take to effect a cure.

Bob Morgan is a retired, award-winning journalist and an author.