History SciFiWritersHave / NoSenseOfUnits

* Many of the BigBrotherIsWatching type conspiracy theories suffer from this, as the person clearly has no idea how much manpower, technology, etc such a thing would take (as well as massively overestimating how good surveillance technology is, such as assuming security cameras would get a clear shot of everyone's face that they see, even if dozens of people are looking at the camera from dozens of different angles at once.) [[http://terribletruth-beautifullie.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-government-isnt-watching-you_16.html this article provides a detailed explanation of why it wouldn't work, including math to back it all up -- for example, for a country like, say, Britain, you would need 6.7 MILLION tapes per day for 24-hour surveillance]]. Some works and theories ([[UnbuiltTrope including]] ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' itself) correct this by noting that they are not spying on ''all'' the people ''all'' the time, but just enough spying on just enough people to make one paranoid -- or give incentives to others (including friends and family) to do the spying for them. Likewise, in ''1984'' it's stated just the Party members are spied upon with the Proles largely left to their own save for some Thought Police members scattered through them.

* Many of the BigBrotherIsWatching type conspiracy theories suffer from this, as the person clearly has no idea how much manpower, technology, etc such a thing would take (as well as massively overestimating how good surveillance technology is, such as assuming security cameras would get a clear shot of everyone's face that they see, even if dozens of people are looking at the camera from dozens of different angles at once.) [[http://terribletruth-beautifullie.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-government-isnt-watching-you_16.html this article provides a detailed explanation of why it wouldn't work, including math to back it all up -- for example, for a country like, say, Britain, you would need 6.7 MILLION tapes per day for 24-hour surveillance]]. Some works and theories ([[UnbuiltTrope including]] ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' itself) correct this by noting that they are not spying on ''all'' the people ''all'' the time, but just enough spying on just enough people to make one paranoid -- or give incentives to others (including friends and family) to do the spying for them.

* An aversion in the ''VideoGame/MassEffect'' series that otherwise has easily and fast interstellar travel and the characters casually hopping around the galaxy; Reaper invasions, where they wipe out all civilizations above a certain technological level and then remove evidence of their own existence, and have a billion years of experience in doing it, can take centuries to accomplish simply because of the distances involved and number of stars and planets, and even then they can still miss things.

* The non-fiction book ''Innumeracy: Mathematical Illeteracy And Its Consequences'' [[DiscussedTrope discusses this in great detail.]] At one point, he mentions how someone recommended a baseball team have each of the players play in a different position for a game in order to see who is best at what. There are 9 positions in baseball, meaning the number of games they would have to play is 9 factorial, or 362880. Assuming they played one game a day, it would take about 994 years to play them all.

* ''Manga/DragonBall'':

* The book ''Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its consequences'', which mostly [[DiscussedTrope about this exact topic]] cite's someone who recommended that a local baseball team play a game with the players in each configuration in order to see who was best at what. There are up to 28 players on a baseball team, so number of possible games would have to be at least 28 factorial or about 3.04x10^30 power games, which is a "little" too many to play.

** ''Literature/TheCavesOfSteel'' takes place "thousands of years in the future", where Earth is overpopulated and all Earthmen are crowded into domed Cities in cramped quarters. The world population at that point? 8 billion (in real life, we reached 7 billion in 2012 and are on track to hit 8 billion in 2025). In this case, though, it's more that the population has "concentrated" itself ... there are vast tracts of uninhabited land between the cities, it's just that no one ever goes there [[spoiler: (and this is even a ''plot point'')]].

* In 2014 Anton Purisima tried to sue Au Bon Pain for 2 '''undecillion''' dollars. This is roughly what you would get if you turned the ''entire mass of the sun'' into 1000 dollar bills.

** In ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'', the codex explicitly states that the whole Andromeda Initiative ([[MileLongShip the 15.47km 2.2-billion ton Nexus and five 1.5km 17-million ton Arks]] with revolutionary breakthroughs in FTL drives and AI, developed and made in less than a decade) was privately funded by Jien Garson who's cited as one of the wealthiest humans in the galaxy. The problem is that the codex says she's a mere ''billionaire'', implying the cost of the Initiative was far below 1 trillion credits. As the similarly state of the art 155m Normandy SR-1 was stated to cost 120 billion credits, a credit having rough proportional purchasing power of an American dollar or euro (e.g. the indentured servant contract broker on Illium mentions that an inexperienced but skilled technical worker could earn "hundreds of thousands of credits" in seven years), it becomes impossible for a fleet millions of times the mass to have been developed and made so cheap. Moreover the setting where a single soft-drink line can net 12 trillion credits of revenue a day (per the Tupari ad), a single mining operation can shift [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Viantel hundreds of millions of tons of material per day]], and where mid-sized corporations regularly rule entire planets having few to no trillionaires or others willing to shill out such cash is highly implausible. The novel ''[[Literature/MassEffectInitiation Initiation]]'' fixed this by retconning the Initiative to have costed a ''quadrillion'' credits, directly implying Garson's net worth is higher than that number as everyone believed her capable of funding such a thing alone.[[note]]At least, quadrillion was the ''official'' cost. Cora repeats the number to Alec Ryder, who corrects her that it actually costed a ''quintillion'' credits due to all the hidden costs (the secret AI research project, for example, far outstripped the cost of all the Initiative's tangible assets).[[/note]] [[spoiler:Ultimately {{subverted}}: the game itself reveals that the codex is an UnreliableExpositor. Garson secretly got a big infusion of cash from Cerberus, which has members on the boards of several large corporations, once the Reaper invasion came to light.]]

'''Brainpod:''' Two thousand? Huh. Daring move, since of course you yourself only contain a whopping [[UpToEleven 13]].\\

** Selas' plan to invade Vulcan with ''2,000'' troops and her belief that they'd be nearly impossible to dislodge since they had been 'dug in' by the time Starfleet responds. There is no way this number makes any sense at all. For reference, they’re at a five to one ‘’disadvantage’’ in manpower compared with ‘’the Los Angeles Police Department’’

** ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'' claims that there are only 28 planets that support intelligent life in the whole of Universe 7 (and that's after you subtract previously inhabited planets blown up by Freeza, the Saiyans, or Beerus). That is, quite simply, a ridiculously low number of life-supporting planets for an entire universe, assuming that it's anywhere near the size of the real one. It also makes the Frieza Force's entire business model of conquering planets and selling them to the highest bidder ridiculous, because who are they going to sell them ''to'' if there are so few inhabited worlds in the first place? And that's not even taking into account that Earth, New Namek, and Jaco's world are out of the equation, and there has to be at least ONE planet buying them, which means that Frieza's business empire has really been trading around at most only 24 planets somehow, and that's with the ridiculous and borderline impossible assumption that Frieza has conquered those 24 planets and sold them to just a single solitary planet buyer. Then again, Universe 7 is also supposed to be the second-worst Universe out of the 12 in terms of its "Mortal Life Level", so the low number of planets might be indicative of ''tremendous'' mismanagement by U7's gods ([[spoiler:so bad, in fact, that the TopGod Zen'O had already decided U7 doesn't deserve to exist and should be annihilated, along with the gods in charge of it]]).

** ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'' claims that there are only 28 planets that support intelligent life in the whole of Universe 7 (and that's after you subtract previously inhabited planets blown up by Freeza, the Saiyans, or Beerus). That is, quite simply, a ridiculously low number of life-supporting planets for an entire universe, assuming that it's anywhere near the size of the real one. It also makes the Frieza Force's entire business model of conquering planets and selling them to the highest bidder ridiculous, because who are they going to sell them ''to'' if there are so few inhabited worlds in the first place? And that's not even taking into account that Earth, New Namek, and Jaco's world are out of the equation, and there has to be at least ONE planet buying them, which means that Frieza's business empire has really been trading around at most only 24 planets somehow, and that's with the ridiculous and borderline impossible assumption that Frieza has conquered those 24 planets and sold them to just a single solitary planet buyer. Any less than 24 and it just becomes even more confusing how his business is functioning. Then again, Universe 7 is also supposed to be the second-worst Universe out of the 12 in terms of its "Mortal Life Level", so the low number of planets might be indicative of ''tremendous'' mismanagement by U7's gods ([[spoiler:so bad, in fact, that the TopGod Zen'O had already decided U7 doesn't deserve to exist and should be annihilated, along with the gods in charge of it]]).

** ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'' claims that there are only 28 planets that support intelligent life in the whole of Universe 7 (and that's after you subtract previously inhabited planets blown up by Freeza, the Saiyans, or Beerus). That is, quite simply, a ridiculously low number of life-supporting planets for an entire universe, assuming that it's anywhere near the size of the real one. It also makes the Frieza Force's entire business model of conquering planets and selling them to the highest bidder ridiculous, because who are they going to sell them ''to'' if there are so few inhabited worlds in the first place? And that's not even taking into account that Earth, New Namek, and Jaco's world are out of the equation, and there has to be at least ONE planet buying them, which means that Frieza's business empire has really been trading around at most only 24 planets somehow. Then again, Universe 7 is also supposed to be the second-worst Universe out of the 12 in terms of its "Mortal Life Level", so the low number of planets might be indicative of ''tremendous'' mismanagement by U7's gods ([[spoiler:so bad, in fact, that the TopGod Zen'O had already decided U7 doesn't deserve to exist and should be annihilated, along with the gods in charge of it]]).

** The strength of ''ComicBook/BlackCanary's'' canary cry has several times been stated as being 300 decibels, which is much more than the shockwave you get from a good-sized nuclear explosion. People who have been hit it have just been thrown around some and survived with minor injuries, while in fact they should have been reduced to a thin red mist.
** Pre-Crisis ''ComicBook/{{Superboy}}'' helps out a scientist who wants to measure the loudest sound he can create. Superboy complies by first providing five thousand decibels, keep in mind that a one-point-one thousand decibel "sound" contains more power than the ''entire mass-energy of the observable universe'', and would [[https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ow98s/eli5_why_and_how_would_a_1100_decibel_sound_make/ instantly turn into an absurdly large black hole]]. Then he one-ups himself by '''one million decibels'''.

** ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'' claims that there are only 28 planets that support intelligent life in the whole of Universe 7 (and that's after you subtract previously inhabited planets blown up by Freeza, the Saiyans, or Beerus). That is, quite simply, a ridiculously low number of life-supporting planets for an entire universe, assuming that it's anywhere near the size of the real one. It also makes the Frieza Force's entire business model of conquering planets and selling them to the highest bidder ridiculous, because who are they going to sell them ''to'' if there are so few inhabited worlds in the first place? Then again, Universe 7 is also supposed to be the second-worst Universe out of the 12 in terms of its "Mortal Life Level", so the low number of planets might be indicative of ''tremendous'' mismanagement by U7's gods ([[spoiler:so bad, in fact, that the TopGod Zen'O had already decided U7 doesn't deserve to exist and should be annihilated, along with the gods in charge of it]]).

** In ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'', the codex explicitly states that the whole Andromeda Initiative ([[MileLongShop the 15.47km 2.2-billion ton Nexus and five 1.5km 17-million ton Arks]] with revolutionary breakthroughs in FTL drives and AI, developed and made in less than a decade) was privately funded by Jien Garson who's cited as one of the wealthiest humans in the galaxy. The problem is that the codex says she's a mere ''billionaire'', implying the cost of the Initiative was far below 1 trillion credits. As the similarly state of the art 155m Normandy SR-1 was stated to cost 120 billion credits, a credit having rough proportional purchasing power of an American dollar or euro (e.g. the indentured servant contract broker on Illium mentions that an inexperienced but skilled technical worker could earn "hundreds of thousands of credits" in seven years), it becomes impossible for a fleet millions of times the mass to have been developed and made so cheap. Moreover the setting where a single soft-drink line can net 12 trillion credits of revenue a day (per the Tupari ad), a single mining operation can shift [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Viantel hundreds of millions of tons of material per day]], and where mid-sized corporations regularly rule entire planets having few to no trillionaires or others willing to shill out such cash is highly implausible. The novel ''[[Literature/MassEffectInitiation Initiation]]'' fixed this by retconning the Initiative to have costed a ''quadrillion'' credits, directly implying Garson's net worth is higher than that number as everyone believed her capable of funding such a thing alone.[[note]]At least, quadrillion was the ''official'' cost. Cora repeats the number to Alec Ryder, who corrects her that it actually costed a ''quintillion'' credits due to all the hidden costs (the secret AI research project, for example, far outstripped the cost of all the Initiative's tangible assets).[[/note]] [[spoiler:Ultimately {{subverted}}: the game itself reveals that the codex is an UnreliableExpositor. Garson secretly got a big infusion of cash from Cerberus, which has members on the boards of several large corporations, once the Reaper invasion came to light.]]

** In ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'', the codex explicitly states that the whole Andromeda Initiative ([[MileLongShop the 15.47km 2.2-billion ton Nexus and five 1.5km 17-million ton Arks]] with revolutionary breakthroughs in FTL drives and AI, developed and made in less than a decade) was (seemingly) privately funded by Jien Garson who's cited as one of the wealthiest humans in the galaxy. The problem is that the codex says she's a mere ''billionaire'', implying the cost of the Initiative was far below 1 trillion credits. As the similarly state of the art 155m Normandy SR-1 was stated to cost 120 billion credits, a credit having rough proportional purchasing power of an American dollar or euro (e.g. the indentured servant contract broker on Illium mentions that an inexperienced but skilled technical worker could earn "hundreds of thousands of credits" in seven years), it becomes impossible for a fleet millions of times the mass to have been developed and made so cheap. Moreover the setting where a single soft-drink line can net 12 trillion credits of revenue a day (per the Tupari ad), a single mining operation can shift [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Viantel hundreds of millions of tons of material per day]], and where mid-sized corporations regularly rule entire planets having few to no trillionaires or others willing to shill out such cash is highly implausible. The novel ''[[Literature/MassEffectInitiation Initiation]]'' fixed this by retconning the Initiative to have costed a ''quadrillion'' credits, directly implying Garson's net worth is higher than that number as everyone believed her capable of funding such a thing alone.[[note]]At least, quadrillion was the ''official'' cost. Cora repeats the number to Alec Ryder, who corrects her that it actually costed a ''quintillion'' credits due to all the hidden costs (the secret AI research project, for example, far outstripped the cost of all the Initiative's tangible assets).[[/note]]

* The non-fiction book ''Innumeracy: Mathematical Illeteracy And Its Consequences'' [[DiscussedTrope discusses this in great detail.]] At one point, he mentions how someone recommended a baseball team have each of the players play in a different position for a game in order to see who is best at once. There are 9 positions in baseball, meaning the number of games they would have to play is 9 factorial, or 362880. Assuming they played one game a day, it would take about 994 years to play them all.

* The non-fiction book ''Innumeracy: Mathematical Illeteracy and it's consequences [[DiscussedTrope discusses this in great detail.]] At one point, he mentions how someone recommended a baseball team have each of the players play in a different position for a game in order to see who is best at once. There are 9 positions in baseball, meaning the number of games they would have to play is 9 factorial, or 362880. Assuming they played one game a day, it would take about 994 years to play them all.

* ''Literature/TheBible'': Noah's ark is said to be 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. While pretty huge for a wooden ship, it seems a wee bit too small to hold two of every singly non-aquatic animal on Earth (though one can certainly argue the animals[[AWizardDidIt were magically shrunken down or something along those lines.]]) There is another view, though, that “kind” referred to created kind, such as dog, cat, horse, elephant etc, rather than every single species, which could make it more plausible (assuming one doesn't think it was just allegorical, or a scaled-up version of something more mundane, eg. a regional flood with only local animals).

** There was also the whole episode which consisted of Zurg and the Rangers building bigger and bigger mechs. "And you're sure there is nothing bigger than grande?" "Meet my Vente range bot!"

** On the other hand, this is [[EvilIsPetty Aku]] we are talking about. Given that we have seen him [[ChronicBackstabbingDisorder betray people who had captured Jack]], he might simply have no intention to ever actually pay the bounty.

** In ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'', the codex explicitly states that the whole Andromeda Initiative (which involved building a 2.2 billion ton ship, the Nexus, and several other 17 million ton ships, the Arks, in less than a decade) was funded by a single person. Considering how enormously powerful Citadel Space's economy is depicted as in the series, that's not too bad, given that said person (Jien Garson) was cited as one of the wealthiest humans in the galaxy. The problem is that the codex says she's a mere ''billionaire'', implying the cost of the Initiative was far below 1 trillion credits. ''This'' is completely unbelievable, as it implies 2.3+ billion tons of cutting-edge FTL-capable spacecraft averages out to just a few hundred credits per ton at most (not taking into account all the other costs of the expedition like the revolutionary breakthroughs in FTL drives and AI required for it to be feasible or the infrastructure to support a large city present on the Nexus), and more pressingly, implies that an economy where a single soft-drink line can sell 12 trillion 1 credit bottles a day (see the Tupari ad), where a single mining operation can shift [[https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Viantel hundreds of millions of tons of material per day]], and where mid-sized corporations regularly rule entire planets has few to no trillionaires in it. Note that in other sources a credit is given the rough proportional purchasing power of an American dollar or euro (e.g. the indentured servant contract broker on Illium mentions that an inexperienced but skilled technical worker could earn "hundreds of thousands of credits" in seven years). The novel ''Initiation'' fixed this by retconning the Initiative to have costed a ''quadrillion'' credits, directly implying Garson's net worth is higher than that number as everyone believed her capable of funding such a thing alone.[[note]]At least, quadrillion was the ''official'' cost. Cora repeats the number to Alec Ryder, who corrects her that it actually costed a ''quintillion'' credits due to all the hidden costs (the secret AI research project, for example, far outstripped the cost of all the Initiative's tangible assets).[[/note]]

** The ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragonsThirdEdition Dungeon Master's Guide'' groups settlements as having permanent populations ranging from 20-80 people for a "thorp", up to 25,000+ for a "metropolis". Major cities had already gotten much bigger than 25,000 by the year 2000 BCE, never mind the High Middle Ages timeframe that D&D settings normally adapt: in the year 1200 CE, Earth had at least three million-person cities.

'''Brainpod:''' Two thousand? huh. Daring move, since of course you yourself only contain a whopping [[UpToEleven 13]].\\

* Parodied in one episode of ''WesternAnimation/BuzzLightyearOfStarCommand'', where Evil Emperor Zurg decides to make a [[PsychoRangers team of evil, cloned rangers]]. [[TwentyPercentMoreAwesome Towards the beginning, the following conversation takes place when trying to decide how "Evil" to make the rangers:]]
-->'''Zurg:''' Give them... a hundred evil! No, wait, a thousand evil! No, make it a MILLION evil! [[EvilLaugh MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!]]\\
'''Grub:''' Gee, that's awfully daring, your evilness, seeing as you only have an Evilness rating of [[UpToEleven 13]].\\
'''Zurg:''' Oh. Well, um, on second thought, how about we just give them a twelve.

** Selas' plan to invade Vulcan with ''2,000'' troops and her belief that they'd be nearly impossible to dislodge since they had been 'dug in' by the time Starfleet responds. There is no way this number makes any sense at all.