December 16, 2009

How Big?.... When I was a child, my mother used to laugh because I used the word ‘million” to express everything from how much homework I had (a “million pages”) to how many birds were sitting on a wire. It was a number that meant, “too big to count.”

Recently I’ve been reading I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away (http://tinyurl.com/yaqnuae) by Bill Bryson (author of A Walk in the Woods). Published in 1999, it’s a compilation of a series of articles he wrote for Night & Day magazine, the Sunday supplement to London’s Mail on Sunday.

In his chapter called “The Numbers Game” he talks about how big numbers are simply beyond what we are capable of grasping. He uses the federal deficit as a way of explaining how large a trillion is. In 1999, the deficit was $4.5 trillion (today it’s roughly $12 trillion).

Bryson says “Imagine you were in a vault filled with dollar bills and that you were told you could keep each one you initialed. Say, too, for the sake of argument that you could initial one dollar bill per second and that you worked straight through without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count a trillion dollars?…You would make $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days – something over three years – to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would be a billionaire…But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you’d be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America’s debt.”)

Now, my commentary is not meant to be a political statement. It’s only meant to demonstrate how much a trillion is. Initialing dollar bills as Bryson suggests would take a person more than 120,000 years to get through our national debt. Or, by my calculations 2,000 people could each spend 60 years nonstop.

In fact, a trillion pieces of paper laid end-to-end would stretch from the earth to the sun … and back … with a lot of paper to spare. One trillion seconds is much, much longer than recorded history. A million minutes ago was just under two years. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.

One trillion is literally a 1 with 12 zeros. Scientists estimate that the Milky Way has somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. Imagine that you could see all of them and then realize how many more a trillion would be!  

Talk about being too big to count or wrap your head around!

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