That's a big number!

I was sitting in Operations Management last night. It's one of my classes in the MBA program at Northwest Nazarene University. The professor was talking about the proposed federal bail out of the banking industry, and he said he couldn't get his head around the number 1 trillion. So I whipped out my handy dandy calculator and tried to come up with a way to help myself grasp  the enormity of this figure.

I had seen an e-mail that went around talking about how 1 billion seconds was almost 32 years. Well, if that's the case, then 1 trillion seconds is 1,000 times that. 32,000 years -almost. 32,000 yeas ago, they say, Neanderthals were walking around France (probably wondering about car insurance).The average human life span is .236% of that. If you could count from the day you were born until the day you died and say one number per second, without stopping for food or a bathroom break, you would only getup to little more than 2.36 billion. Thats about how many beats your heart has in it.  That still seems a little big to comprehend. So I decided to divide some other big numbers in to a trillion and see what that comes out to.

The surface of the earth is 196,940,400 square miles. Dividing that in to 1 trillion, you get 5,077 earths. Holy crowded solar system, Batman! 

Heres another way to look at this. The total volume of water on the earth is estimated at 1,360,000,000 (1.36 billion) cubic kilometers. 1 trillion kilometers cubed is a little more than 735 times that. 

In the average human brain it is estimated that there are 100 billion neurons. So, a trillion would be 10 human brains. That's quite a bit of thinking. 

 

In one cubic foot of sand there are approximately 769,230,769 grains. To get to 1 trillion grains you need a shovel full more that 1,300 cubic feet of sand. That's almost enough to fill 5 ten cubic yard dump trucks (about 1.85 cubic yards shy, actually). It's starting to get a little easier now. Or is it?

Back to the bail out. Let's say they actually have to print that 1 trillion dollars or 10 billion $100 bills, and they could print 100 of them in one second. It would take 100 million seconds, or nearly 3.2 years to do. Talk about going green. eh? 

Oh, and don't forget the interest!