Ten ways to visualize $10 trillion
October 10th, 2008 | by mbhunter |
Maybe you’ve heard about the US Federal Debt crossing the $10 trillion mark. This is a huge number.
At one point I heard someone say that physicists were better than average about attaching value to really big or really small numbers, so here’s my crack at it. I’ll let you be the judge.
- $10 trillion written out is one followed by 13 zeros to the left of the decimal point: $10,000,000,000,000.
- $10 trillion in one-dollar bills make a stack over 678,000 miles high. This is about three times the distance to the Moon.
- $10 trillion in Lincoln cents would make a solid cube over half a mile on a side. This dwarfs the tallest structures in the world.
- $10 trillion in one-dollar bills would blanket almost 40,000 square miles — enough to cover the state of Indiana and a couple of Rhode Islands.
- $10 trillion in one-dollar bills taped end to end stretch almost 970 million miles. This is five round-trips to the Sun. It takes light almost an hour and a half to travel this distance.
- $10 trillion is almost three times the total market capitalization of the top twenty publicly traded US companies, combined. Exxon-Mobil, General Electric, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Berkshire Hathaway are the top five on this list.
- $10 trillion accumulates over $1 billion in interest per day at 4%. It accumulates in four seconds more than the average US worker makes in a year.
- $10 trillion is more than three times the current spot price of all the gold that has been mined, ever.
- $10 trillion would last Montgomery Brewster over 27,000 years, and you could pay off a hundred Dr. Evils with it.
- $10 trillion could be paid off in a little over nine months if every dollar of our country’s gross domestic product went to paying it back.
A trillion here, a trillion there … pretty soon you’re talking real money!
3 Responses to “Ten ways to visualize $10 trillion”
By Andy @ Retire at 40 on Oct 10, 2008 | Reply
And of course, the saying by Richard Feynman that Astronomical Numbers should actually be renamed Economical Numbers, since they are bigger and less comprehendable.
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
Richard Feynman
US educator & physicist (1918 – 1988)
By BSCC on Oct 10, 2008 | Reply
Good post. The fact that you worked in “Brewster’s Millions” into it gives you tons of cool points from me! Have a great weekend.
By Shaun on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply
Hehe, great article. Remember, this doesn’t factor in obligatory spending. If we factored in the money that will be spent in social security we’d see a figure more in line with 40 trillion. Mind boggling.
We either kill the welfare state or the welfare state kills us. There’s really no alternative.