ANOTHER WAY TO (TRY TO) COMPREHEND ONE TRILLION
Posted by Andrew Roman on February 10, 2009
The Senate is on the brink of passing President Obama’s cavalcade of pig-meat.
With the word “trillion” being tossed around these days like hiccups at a Kennedy family barbecue, the very magnitude of how much that really is can be easily lost on the human brain.
A few days ago, Senator Mitch McConnell gave a marvelous example of how large “one trillion” actually is by saying that if one had spent $1 million a day since the day Jesus was born, he or she would still not have reached a trillion dollars.
That’s hard to ingest.
A caller to Dennis Prager’s radio show yesterday may have come up with an even more effective way of illustrating how big a trillion is.
If one were to go back in time one trillion seconds, he or she would be going back nearly 32,000 years.
32,000 years!
Or another way to say it … If one could count to one trillion, at one number per second, without any breaks, it would take them just over 31,688 years to get there (assuming each year is 365.25 days, accounting for leap years).
The math:
There are 60 seconds in a minute.
There are 60 minutes in an hour. That’s 3600 seconds per hour.
There are 24 hours in a day. That’s 86400 seconds in one day.
There are 365.25 days a year. That’s 31,557,600 seconds in a year.
If you take the number ONE TRILLION – 1,000,000,000,000 and divide it by 31,557,600 you come up with 31,688.0878 etc …
In other news, the Obama administration is “fundamentally transforming” my country into a socialist state, dammit.
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