"Playing the lotto during a billion dollar craze gives me a sigh of relief that someone won and it's no use playing next draw after the draw."
I've got no idea what that means. If it means you don't bother playing when the jackpot is small that's sensible, but the jackpot is small for the first several drawings after somebody wins regardless of how high the jackpot got before somebody won. What happens if somebody wins at 100, 200, or 300 million and the jackpot drops back to $40 million?
"That way I can play RESPONSIBLY."
If you have any trouble playing responsibly then you've got a problem. And while it makes more sense to play when the jackpot is big than when it's small playing responsibly is based on what you can afford to lose and your motivation for playing. Even if you've got a million in the bank any feeling that you have to play is absolute proof that you have a problem.
"As for the big B, nobody can predict at this point."
Probability tells us exactly what the chances are of selling n tickets without producing a winner.The only difficulty of calculating the chances of the jackpot reaching 1 billion or more is knowing exactly how many tickets will have to be sold without a winner to get the roll that reaches or passes the 1 billion mark. I'll make a SWAG that the jackpot has to be at least 750 for a roll to take us to a billion. That means we might get to 700 or 725 and come up a bit short, get there from 750 or 800, or get well past it from 900 or so.
Let's figure the chances of rolling from advertised jackpots of 750 and 900. Getting from the current 373 to either 750 or 900 requires selling about 450 or 630 million tickets without a winner. The chances of that happening are right about 22% and 11.6%. Let's call it roughly a 1 in 5 chance of a jackpot pretty close to a billion, or a 1 in 10 chance of something well over a billion.
Either way, let's not obsess over it. Either it happens or it doesn't, far less money is far more than anyone needs to solve any financial problems and live extravagantly, and the chance of winning even with 10 tickets is just about 0.000000%.