Forget about the money for the moment, and lets talk about the number: 1,000,000,000,000
Something to think about really, an astronomical number, a number inconceivably large. If you don't think so, close your eyes for a minute and imagine 1 ping pong ball. Not so hard a feat to accomplish, now imagine a dozen. A dozen is something you can grasp, a dozen eggs... easy to imagine. Now, ready for a challenge? Close your eyes and imagine a gross of ping pong balls, that's 144. Could you do it? Were there ping pong balls everywhere? Now, close your eyes and imagine one million ping pong balls, one billion? One trillion? Where and at what point did you lose any hope of keeping track of them all?
What does a trillion really mean? One third of all fish in the sea? The number of 'human' cells in your body (Believe me you don't want to know the number of non-human cells in your body). The number of unique URLs identified by Google. The number of seconds in 31,546 years.
It takes 5 trillion snowflakes to cover a football field to a depth of 1 foot with wet snow, for a total weight of 539 tons.
Lets talk money!
1 trillion dollars, strung end to end is roughly 1 astronomical unit, or the distance from the earth to the sun. 1 trillion pennies stacked evenly would form a cube 237 feet on each side and weigh 3,125,000 tons (that's roughly 6 billion pounds). There are estimated to be only 140 billion pennies in circulation, with only 300 billion ever made.
1 trillion dollars, spread evenly across the population works out to be $3,320 dollars a head. But then again, we don't all work, do we? So that's a $6,835 dollar tab for each and everyone of us that is employed.
Various estimates for the total costs range from 2 to 5 trillion dollars when all is said and done. By comparison, the Louisiana purchase cost us 15 million, adjusted for inflation that works out to only 217 billion. The New Deal cost us 54 billion, adjusted for inflation to around half a trillion dollars. The most expensive single event in American history was World War Two, with a price tag of 288 billion, adjusted for inflation to 3.6 trillion. Afterwards, we rebuilt Europe under the Marshall plan for just 12.7 billion, or 115 billion in today's money.
We could nationalize all credit card debt for just 2.5 trillion dollars according to the Federal Reserve.
That's not to say we ought to do nothing, just pay attention and make sure we get our dollar's worth.
~Finntann~
3 comments:
Finally, Finntan appears!
It's staggering to try to imagine such a large amount. Just a few short months ago, a trillion seemed like a lot of money.
think of it in segments
0001 0000 0000 0000 and it is a lot easier to digest :)
I feel sorry for our children also for the babyboomers.
I thought you were doing binary there for a minute... but you only got to 4096. One trillion would actually look a lot scarier in binary. It's E8D4A51000 in Hex. That could be congress's next trick: express the debt in Hexadecimal to throw everybody off. We only spent C0FFEE today!
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