With it conceivable that some lucky owner of a Powerball ticket tonight could be the winner of $1.5 billion, we figured we would attempt to put in perspective exactly how much money $1,500,000,000 is.

If a person were paid $1,000 an hour to perform his job, that person would have to work 171 straight years to earn $1.5 billion — and that is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, without vacation to play golf at the beach or sick time to recover from the flu. It’s even more than our county commissioners pay themselves.

So it’s unlikely that you will labor your way to that kind of wealth or invest your way there either, leaving the Powerball — and its odds of more than 292 million to one against your winning — as your best bet to become a billionaire, as sorry as it is.

But that $1.5 billion is paid out over 30 years, unless the winner — as most do — ops for a one-time payment, which would be in the neighborhood of $900 million, enough to get by on, even after the government grabs its rather sizable cut of almost 40 percent.

We had planned to devote several paragraphs of today’s Our View to what we consider the less-sunny side of the lottery, the fact that it does little to enhance education while taking money out of the pockets of poor people who are seduced by Everyman’s dream of getting rich quick and buy tickets over food, shelter and diapers.

But Chris Fitzsimon, the executive director of the left-leaning N.C. Policy Watch, did that for us in an op-ed piece that can be found to your right. Plus, we have underlined the hypocrisy of the lottery in this space more than once before.

We will add this, however: The lottery encourages some of the worst of human behavior, that a person can be rewarded for pretty much doing nothing — unless purchasing a $2 lotto ticket is virtuous. The best path to wealth continues to be to work hard and spend and invest wisely, but that’s not sexy and is without instant gratification. End of lecture.

So if you are a proud owner of a Powerball ticket, you know the odds are 292.2 million to one that you won’t win the biggest prize ever. Let’s put those odds in perspective as well.

If you live to be 80 years old, your chances of getting struck by lightning are about one in 12,000. For an average golfer, the odds of making a hole-in-one are similar, about one in 12,500, making the odds of getting hit by lightning and making a hole-on-one about 150 million to one.

So you have roughly the same chance of getting hit by lightning while scoring a hole-in-one — twice — as you do of moving to Easy Street after tonight.

But someone is going to defy those odds and have a lot more relatives and friends.

If some of the folks at The Robesonian, who have figured out journalism is no road to riches, can’t win tonight, might as well be you. And remember, shop local.