Counting to a trillion: Think eons, ages, epochs
The national debt is $14 trillion. That is a lot of money. Even a trillion is a lot of money. I learned how much after reading this calculation by former math teacher Edward Hopkins, husband of my colleague Jamie Smith Hopkins. You could win trillions of bar bets by asking: How long would it take to count to a trillion?
How much is a trillion?It's not easy to understand large numbers like billions and trillions, yet we hear about them all the time when people are discussing the economy.
What would happen if you tried to count to one trillion out loud?
Assuming five syllables per second and accounting for the fact that larger numbers have more syllables, I came up with an estimate.Counting to 10 will take two seconds.
You will reach a hundred in about one minute. After 18 minutes you will hit a thousand. To get to a million takes 700 hours.Now we're getting to the point where the time is getting too large to easily comprehend. Let's make counting a full-time job of eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. Counting to a million would take about 18 weeks, or from January to the first week in May. To reach 10 million would require four years of counting. If you started young and retired after 48 years of counting, you'd be at 100 million.
To continue we're going to need new counters to carry on the project.
If we employ each person for 50 years, we'll need a succession of 10 more people for a total of 11 lifetimes just to count to a billion.Archaeologists believe the human race invented counting about 50,000 years ago. Counting to a trillion would take 15 times longer that that.
Comments
This kind of reminds me of the (excellent) YouTube video using pennies to show how much money Obama planned to cut from the Federal Budget:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE
Posted by: John J. Walters | May 4, 2011 11:37 AM