How much is a trillion anyway?
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to lose the awe I first felt when I heard the number “one trillion.” The number has been thrown around so much with the stimulus plan, various bailouts, etc. that it is easy to forget how large that number truly is. Let’s see it written out, just to see how impressive it looks:
I would like to recast it a few different ways. For example, Jesus Christ was born something over 2000 years ago, although the exact date is not known. Let’s assume that December 25th, 2008 really was His 2008th birthday. This equates to approximately 733,422 days, depending on leap years, historical changes etc. (I simply assumed 365.25 days per year). Since that was 69 days ago, we are now at 733,491 days since His birth.
I’m going to round it off and call it 734,000 days. If you opened a business on day 1, and lost $1.36 MILLION every single day since then, you would have lost $998 billion, or basically $1 trillion.
Another way to think about it is that there are 300 million Americans (in round numbers). So, $1 trillion is just over $3,300 for every single American. That doesn’t sound as big, does it?
Or how about this? Assume your heart beats 75 times per minute, and that you live 75 years, which is roughly the average life expectancy in the United States. You would have to spend $338 per heartbeat to reach $1 trillion in your lifetime.
What do you think? Do you have a different way of getting your head around the concept of a trillion? Let me know in the comments if you do.
EDIT — A number of people told me they would like to see this type of thing as a separate category, so I’m filing it under number freaking instead.
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Comments
How about $9.30 for every person who has EVER lived(~107.5 Billion)
Or 148 Cheeseburgers for everyone living today.
Or Mexico’s GDP…
[...] is probably not accurate as excel can’t really calculate accurately with that many digits). This post already showed you how big a trillion is, so imagine a number 171,000 times that [...]
This is the one that hits me the hardest:
One trillion dollar = no personal income tax for 8 years. Yes everybody could live without paying income tax for 8 years.
(income tax source http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html)
Total bailout commitments = 9 trillion dollars
= USA could be personal income tax free for 72 years!! Yes that means at least 2 generations.
(source NYTImes http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/04/business/20090205-bailout-totals-graphic.html)
Would eliminating personal income tax may have been a better strategy to lift the country out of depression? I think so, do you?
One trillion is fair enough to help economically poor nations back to their stability, improve every aspects of the government and enhance the manpower.
I never thought of this figure until you did. This is a huge number that if converted into money could possibly educate hundreds of thousands of minds all over the world. A possible solution to the increasing level of poverty.
Given the median sale price of a home is $140,900, 1 trillion dollars could build 7,097,232 separate homes. Since the US population as of July 2008 is estimated to be 303,824,640, you could build one new home for every 42 US citizens.
6110*4 = 24,441 is the average 4 year public college tuition. Since approximately 25% of the US population has a college degree, the remaining 75% or 227,868,480 could compete for 40,914,856 more college degrees, basically giving a college education to an additional 13.5% of the population.