Brain Drippings

A friend of mine recently posted a link to an aid for visualizing just how large a number a trillion is.
 
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
 
And while that is useful, I have a couple of other methods I’d like to throw at you.
 
First, is the stack of $1 bills.
 
A million $1 bills is a lot of bills, and stacked one on top of the other, would reach over 300 feet. A billion $1 bills would reach higher than any aircraft has ever flown to over 300,000 feet.
 
OK?
 
A Trillion $1 bills would stack up over 55,000 *MILES*, or a fifth of the way to the moon.
 
The stack would weigh about million metric tons. The USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier with a crew of about 6,000 people, weighs in at a shade under 100 metric tons. So a trillion dollars would weigh more than 10,000 USS Nimitzs. That’s hard to imagine.
 
If you took 1,000,000 $1 bills and laid them out on a standard NFL field they would cover the space from one goal line to the nearest 35 yard line. If you took a billion of them, you could easily cover 250 acres.
 
A trillion? A trillion dollar would cover a third of Rhode Island. Still hard to imagine, isn’t it.
 
OK, imagine the Empire State Building. Built in the 1930s it is made of steel and stone and is over 1200 feet high. It’s an icon of not just New York, but of America and of the 1930′s. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for nearly 50 years. Got it in your mind?
 
One trillion $1 bills weighs more than the Empire State Building.
 
One trillion $1 bills weighs more than TWO Empire State Buildings.
 
One trillion $1 bills weighs about the same as THREE Empire State Buildings.
 
Now try this. Open up a web browser and type in:
 
1 million seconds in days
 
now try
 
1 billion seconds in years
 
and finally
 
1 trillion seconds in years

Posted via email