The Measure of All Things

Regardless of what you might think about the idea of a stimulus package to get moving the currently disastrous U.S. economy, seen from a purely mathematical perspective a million (much less a trillion!) of anything is a rather difficult concept for the human mind to grasp—the magnitude is meaningless.

One of my most favorite people, Sherlock Holmes, once complained to his friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson, "Data! Data! Data! I can make no bricks without clay!" It occurred to me that perhaps there was a way to break down the even more difficult concept of a trillion by framing it into somewhat more understandable data "bricks."



Even Sherlock Holmes would agree that a trillion's magnitude
is not so elementary.

So, what is a trillion besides a 1 followed by 12 zeroes?

A trillion seconds add up to 31,710 years. If you started your count while Egypt’s Great Pyramid was being built, you’d have over 26,000 years to go.

If you wanted your trillion dollars in $100 bills, you’d have to carry off 10,000,000,000 bills. This roughly adds up to 9,370 tons of paper—the U-Haul folks will love you!

Stacked one on top of the other a column of those $100 bills would reach 631 miles up, endangering low-orbit traffic, such as Shuttle flights, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Space Telescope.

As the Earth spins on its axis, the poles trace a circle
on the sky, like a top running down. This "precession
of the equinoxes" lasts some 26,000 years and shifts
our view of the starfield, changing the North Star. It
was Thuban 5,000 years ago, Polaris today, and will
be Vega in 12,000 years. While you were counting
to a trillion, you would see all three stars occupy
that position, and still have some counting left to do.

If you got your trillion in $1.00 bills, you could construct a wall of bills (laid on their edges) four feet high extending from New York to San Francisco.

It you used a trillion bricks instead of dollars, you could build a wall that not even the ITRS Roadmap considered—it would be 100 feet tall and 60 bricks thick and go around the Earth’s equator.

A trillion dollars, equally divided among the inhabitants of the U.S. would give everyone $3,333.

A car going at 65 miles per hour would take 1,756,235 years to travel a trillion miles.

It would still take a beam of light, speeding at 186,282 miles per second, two months to do it.



It would require the resources of 30 Bill Gates to pony up one
trillion dollars. Source: Microsoft.

A trillion is 9 times the number of people born since the appearance of homo sapiens.

A trillion gallons of water would fill 1,666,667 official Olympic-size swimming pools.

A trillion M&Ms is 7 years’ worth of this candy’s worldwide production.

A trillion gallons of gas could meet U.S. consumption for more than 85 years.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we’re talking about serious numbers…