How big is one trillion?

We constantly hear these giant-sized numbers out of our Gov’t, about the same way we’d throw around $1’s and $10 and $100. These numbers are so huge that it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around them, so, I’m going to translate them into something you might be able to understand.

Seconds.

We all know how long one second is. SNAP! That’s one second. So, how long is a trillion seconds? Before we continue, make your guess. A year? Ten? Five hundred years? How long do you think one trillion seconds is.

Well, a trillion is a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand.

If you made stacks of thousand dollar bills, one thousand bills to a stack, and you made one thousand stacks, and you made one thousand layers, you’d have one trillion dollars.

Remember when George Bush and his cronies sent like $8 billion dollars to Iraq and lost it? (Yeah, right! And nobody knows where it went! What, they just put it into a warehouse and forgot where?) It took a fork lift to load it into several cargo planes! And, that’s only about $8 billion dollars.

So, let’s go back to those seconds.

In one 24 hour day there are 86,400 seconds. Chicken feed, when it comes to thinking about the kind of numbers we are talking about. In fact, it takes over 11.5 days to make a measly million. (I’m going to keep these numbers rounded out slightly on the small side here, just for simplicity.)

11.5 days is a million, huh? Well, multiply that by 1,000 to get one billion; 11,500 days. That’s over 31.7 years, and we’re only up to a billion!

Multiply that by 1,000 again and now we are up to a trillion!

31,700 years!

Actually more, because like I said, I rounded down.

We’re talking seconds here! SNAP! One second. One trillion seconds. All of recorded history is only a teeny, tiny, fraction of this! Less than 1/6^th, even if you count China and India’s claimed 5,000 years.

If our national debt was only one trillion dollars, (HA!) every man, woman, and child, of our approximately 300 million citizens would owe $3,300 just to pay it off! Actually, we owe over 14 times that, or over $46,600 each, and that’s just right now! It’s getting worse every second!

(See here if you’re interested: http://zfacts.com/p/461.html )

Where did it all go? Well, that’s the subject of another article, some other time.

Enjoy your day.

(P.S. I’m collecting. Please remit your payment to me. I’ll take care of all the paperwork with the Gov’t. If you pay now, I’ll let you go for only $42,000, paid in full.)