One is easy. Look in the mirror. You are one.
Or a single basketball, tossed onto a court.
Ten, no trouble. Ten players on that basketball court, running and passing that orange ball, sneakers squeaking.
A hundred ... picture a grid, 10 on a side. Easy to imagine that. Or the crowded hall outside the gym door. Or a box of Kleenex, 100 tissues to the box. The thin professional boxes.
A thousand ... more challenging. Not a figure that had much practical value during 99% of the 300,000 years of human history, where counting was One, Two, Three and Many.
A thousand people crowd that high school gym to watch the game. A thousand days are almost three years. With its broadcast antenna, the Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall.
I like to do the math. To try to imagine numbers. So when the market capitalization of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, hit $4 trillion on Monday, after rising 65% in 2025, my first thought was "What's a trillion, anyway? Can that figure even be imagined?"
The best approach seemed to work our way up slowly, by powers of 10.
For 10,000, we can stick with basketball —about 10,000 spectators at an average WNBA game: 9,800 per game in 2024, over 11,000 in 2025. One week contains 10,800 minutes.
For 100,000, we need to shift sports, and pack Soldier Field way past the 60,338 fan there last Saturday to see the Bears overcome Green Bay, to the crowd cheering the 1926 Army-Navy game — at least 100,000. Wall to wall fans, standing in the aisles, on the roof.
A million? The population of Fort Worth, Texas. The center of the sun is about 1 million degrees, Celsius. Maybe your net worth — with the skyrocketing stock market, and inflation, there are some 24 million millionaires in the United States, the word no longer indicating extravagant wealth — no mansions, no yachts. Just some comforting ballast to keep your ship from flipping in the next storm.
Ten million? Combine the area of the two largest countries in the world, Russia and Canada, and you have about 10,456,000 square miles.
One hundred million? The distance from Earth to the sun is close, averaging about 93 million miles.
One billion. Your heart pumps about a billion gallons over 25 years. And billionaires are the new millionaires. Those people are rich. If you spend $10,000 a day indulging your every whim, it would take you 2,730 years to burn through that cash. Which explains why the very rich, such as Elon Musk, tend to become unglued. The richest man in the world, he's worth $725 billion.
Closing in on a trillion right there. How to conceive of a trillion? Light zips along very fast — taking 8 minutes and 20 seconds to traverse the 93 million miles from the sun to Earth. To travel a trillion miles, light takes about two months.
A shame we aren't on the metric system. The Earth's volume is 1,083,208,840,000 cubic kilometers.
I thought I'd cheat, and consult Google's Gemini AI, since its soaring market value raised this subject, asking, "How to visualize a trillion?"
AI answered immediately:
"One trillion $1 bills stacked would reach about 67,866 miles high, enough to go to the Moon and back more than once."
See the problem with that?
Or a single basketball, tossed onto a court.
Ten, no trouble. Ten players on that basketball court, running and passing that orange ball, sneakers squeaking.
A hundred ... picture a grid, 10 on a side. Easy to imagine that. Or the crowded hall outside the gym door. Or a box of Kleenex, 100 tissues to the box. The thin professional boxes.
A thousand ... more challenging. Not a figure that had much practical value during 99% of the 300,000 years of human history, where counting was One, Two, Three and Many.
A thousand people crowd that high school gym to watch the game. A thousand days are almost three years. With its broadcast antenna, the Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall.
I like to do the math. To try to imagine numbers. So when the market capitalization of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, hit $4 trillion on Monday, after rising 65% in 2025, my first thought was "What's a trillion, anyway? Can that figure even be imagined?"
The best approach seemed to work our way up slowly, by powers of 10.
For 10,000, we can stick with basketball —about 10,000 spectators at an average WNBA game: 9,800 per game in 2024, over 11,000 in 2025. One week contains 10,800 minutes.
For 100,000, we need to shift sports, and pack Soldier Field way past the 60,338 fan there last Saturday to see the Bears overcome Green Bay, to the crowd cheering the 1926 Army-Navy game — at least 100,000. Wall to wall fans, standing in the aisles, on the roof.
A million? The population of Fort Worth, Texas. The center of the sun is about 1 million degrees, Celsius. Maybe your net worth — with the skyrocketing stock market, and inflation, there are some 24 million millionaires in the United States, the word no longer indicating extravagant wealth — no mansions, no yachts. Just some comforting ballast to keep your ship from flipping in the next storm.
Ten million? Combine the area of the two largest countries in the world, Russia and Canada, and you have about 10,456,000 square miles.
One hundred million? The distance from Earth to the sun is close, averaging about 93 million miles.
One billion. Your heart pumps about a billion gallons over 25 years. And billionaires are the new millionaires. Those people are rich. If you spend $10,000 a day indulging your every whim, it would take you 2,730 years to burn through that cash. Which explains why the very rich, such as Elon Musk, tend to become unglued. The richest man in the world, he's worth $725 billion.
Closing in on a trillion right there. How to conceive of a trillion? Light zips along very fast — taking 8 minutes and 20 seconds to traverse the 93 million miles from the sun to Earth. To travel a trillion miles, light takes about two months.
A shame we aren't on the metric system. The Earth's volume is 1,083,208,840,000 cubic kilometers.
I thought I'd cheat, and consult Google's Gemini AI, since its soaring market value raised this subject, asking, "How to visualize a trillion?"
AI answered immediately:
"One trillion $1 bills stacked would reach about 67,866 miles high, enough to go to the Moon and back more than once."
See the problem with that?
To continue reading, click here.
A light-year is measure of distance, rather than time.
ReplyDeleteTo travel a trillion miles, light takes about two months.
The center of the Milky is 26,000 light-years away from our planet.
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years from Earth.
The Virgo Cluster, the nearest large galaxy cluster, is 59 million light-years away.
The edge of the visible universe is 45.7 billion light-years distant.
One light year is equal to 5.88 trillion miles. Do the math.
Our Dear Leader is not even a grain of sand on a vast beach.
He is not even an atom on a grain of sand on a vast beach.
Maybe not even a drop of water in all the world's oceans.
But try telling him that. Just try.
For your fitness freaks out there...if you walked 10,000 steps a day, it would take you 273,972 years to walk a trillion miles. Get off the couch, loser!
ReplyDeleteAnd 1,610,955 years to walk a light-year. To cross the Milky Way would be a hike that lasted 161 billion years. And where would you stop for a candy bar?
DeleteI found this video by Tom Scott to be a wonderful depiction of difference between one million US Dollars and on billion us dollars.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg
I recommend everyone watch it, not only because Tom Scott does a wonderful job of explaining why volumetric examples don't really work well for us humans but also because you may stumble upon another one of his brilliant works.
Sometimes words are harder to see.
Some times, the amount that's in a glass, makes more sense as a length of string.
And sometimes, stacking one dollar bills on top of each other, laying that stack down, and then walking that distance really puts the entire amount into focus.
I have no idea why my comment came in as Anonymous @ 7:40 am
DeleteI'm sure it's clear it was me posting... "I recommend everyone watch it.." at least I'm consistent!
Sorry, Double B. I followed your link, but I think Neil did fine explaining this concept in today's column in a much more timely manner. I'd have watched it if it had been 1 minute and 19 seconds, rather than 1 hour and 19 minutes, though! 😉
DeleteJakash, I agree. But that's also the point. It takes someone an hour and nineteen minutes to DRIVE the width of one billion dollars.
Deletelet that sink in.
But yes, Neil did a wonderful job as well
I read that by 2050 there will be 1,000,000,000,000 hours of videos on the internet. That would take 114,000,000 years to watch it all.
ReplyDeleteAnd about 57 million of them would be spent watching kitty videos. Cool!
DeleteThe number is so big that the subject line in my EGD email cut off the last 3 zeros.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that exercise in numerical comprehension.
ReplyDeleteA trillion is also 1,000 billions and 1 million , millions
Now try to wrap your head around 39 trillion.
That is our national debt
The interest on which is nearly 1 trillion dollars every 3 year.
Yikes
so glad that the party of "fiscal conservatism" is in control of the government. I'm sure they'll be fiscally responsible like they claim they would be when democrats are in charge. Let's see how much managed to reduce the deficit by... [checks notes] oh... they've actually added $10,000,000,000,000 since 2000.
DeleteRepublican's are liars. only fools believe them.
And the national debt has exploded despite massive cuts (and even program eliminations) to our social safety net. It boggles the mind to think where our tax dollars are going, and what our descendants will have to pay for in the coming decades.
DeleteThanks for sharing that video, Anonymous. Very cleverly done
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you liked it, Monica. I find his work to be fantastic.
DeleteQuadrillion anyone?
ReplyDeleteI don't know who coined the term "spinning the numbers", but its a way of political life these days. Numbers are released, no one trusts them, and people can't even agree on whether the number presented is a 'good' thing or a 'bad' thing.
ReplyDeleteAI isn't helpful, either. In your example, AI provides a summary ("AI Overview") claiming a trillion $1 bills would reach the moon. A gross underestimate. The very same AI answer, lower in the details, says "One trillion $1 bills stacked would reach about 67,866 miles high, enough to go to the Moon and back more than once.”
At the average distance of 238,000, that means the bills can stack to the moon and back - but then some unspecified "more". Running the numbers, that stack has enough height to return to the moon a second time, but not enough to make it back to earth.
So those bills are not stacked high enough to make it to the moon and back two times, which is accurate.
But the example underscores the reason AI should not be relied on without fact-checking. The "more than once" doesn't answer the question, and its own condensed summary renders the answer incorrect.
I admit I became comfortable relying on experts to break down the meaning of large numbers. Now that all those experts have been fired, we've got to question them ourselves. Maybe I'd do more of it, but I'm stuck at trying to figure out how we can save over 100% on pharmaceuticals, and how each boat strike in the Caribbean saves 25,000 American lives.
Or, a trillion dollars is about what the Federal government spends every 7-1/2 weeks or so. A trillion here, a trillion there... ...
ReplyDeleteAnyone watching the link posted by Double B should pour a stiff drink beforehand. I once forgave my son for a debt of $10,000 by making a fake stack of $1 dollar bills, which measured over a yard high. When he opened the package on Christmas day, he did something rarely seen...he cried. To him that was an insurmountable amount of money. From that day on neither of us ever had to feel the pain of his debt. It was the best and most memorable gift I've ever given.
ReplyDeleteNeil, it is always fun to measure numbers by time and distance, but what you have presented takes it to a whole new level. The world population today is about 8.5 billion people. A trillion dollars amounts to about $1,176 per person. If Elon Muskrat or anyone else had any interest in solving the problems of the world, they could do it in the snap of a finger. Well, I can dream, right? Thank you for EGD. I thrive on it.
Elon musk does not have a trillion dollars.
Delete1,176 dollars each would not solve the world's problem