Forget about what you would do if you had a million dollars. That's chump change compared to the prize being offered to the lucky winner of the Powerball lottery.

Following another weekend in which no one managed to match all six numbers in the lottery drawing, the Powerball jackpot has now risen to the amount of $400 million. This is one of the largest amounts in the U.S. lottery's history, and would leave the incredibly lucky recipient with a lump sum of about $227 million after taxes.

This is just the latest massive jackpot the lottery has put up for grabs. Just last year, an insanely fortunate woman from Florida took home a Powerball prize of $590.5 million. A year prior to that, three winners split a Mega Millions pot of $656 million, the largest amount ever. ABC news reports that more than half the top lottery prizes ever won have happened since 2012.

This isn't strictly due to fortune. The Powerball has cashed in on the allure of these enormous jackpots, raising the staring amount of the winnings to $40 million, and doubling the prize of a ticket from $1 to $2.

The small price is trivial to those with fantasies of winning big - even if the odds are far from in their favor. The Powerball's official website gives the odds of winning the grand prize at roughly 175 million to 1. The chances are much higher that you'll die in a plane crash than be lucky enough to match all six numbers in the next drawing.

Yet people still line up at that astronomically small chance that they will be the one to get that golden ticket, causing some, as Chris Arnade of The Guardian writes, to ridicule the lottery as a "stupidity tax".

Is it really "stupid" to have dreams of something greater? Ask the millions who will be going to purchase their Powerball ticket for the next drawing this Wednesday. What do you think the jackpot could be next?