So Just How Much is a Trillion Dollars?

As our leaders in Washington, DC prepare to spend more than one trillion dollars - that’s the economic stimulus plus the financing cost - here are a few ways to look at just how high it is to place 12 zeroes after the number one.

From 10077.com

If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills.

It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.

From Jim Loy’s mathematics website:

“If it takes me a second for each number (which is a little unrealistic), then it would take me about 24 hours to count to 86,400. It will take me more than 30 years to count to an American billion.“ (That would then add up to 3,000 years for someone to count to one trillion)

All right, I better come up with one of my own:

A regulation football game lasts 60 minutes. That means it would take 16.6 billion games to play one trillion minutes.

And I bet ESPN’s Chris Berman would be there to do the highlights for every one of them.

Feel free to do your own math and send in the calculations….