This image is 1000 pixels tall and wide, meaning it consists of exactly 1,000,000 pixels. This is quite normal and by no means technically impressive nowadays, but if you think about it, it can be a good demonstration of how much a million is, how insane human brains & computers are and maybe a few other things.

One million is a pretty big number. While one measly pixel is just barely visible to the naked eye (unless you're viewing this on a phone), a million of them can cover a significant portion of your screen. Something that really messes with me is realising how long a line of a million objects is compared to a square or a cube of the same number of objects. If all these pixels were lined up side by side, they would make an image 1000 times wider than this, even if it's just a pixel-thick line. Paint.net won't even let me save a 100000x10 image, let alone a 1000000x1 one. And yet this 1-megapixel square with some smaller rectangles on it is a mere 2.3 kilobytes - I doubt even a calculator would have trouble loading it. Maybe a potato.

This goes to show that a million isn't all that much to a computer. So is a billion, for that matter - if I had the patience to add 999 more images like this here, they would only total a couple of megabytes, as much as one normal PNG. A trillion is probably where it starts to get troublesome, for a million of these 2.3kb images would total 2.3 gigabytes, which is like an indie game.

If a pixel on your screen is 0.25 mm on the side, the image will be 25 centimetres big. If the pixels were cubes, a billion of them would make a block still small enough to fit on your desk. And you can still see each one with the naked eye! Yet a straight line of one million such pixels would be 250 metres long, and a billion pixels would make a line 250 kilometres long. Something the size of a Christmas present could be unraveled into something that stretches across a small country. That's the crazy thing about big numbers - they can seem deceptively small when visualised as an area or volume.