So how far can you get on a trillion dollars?
This week saw a momentous occasion in American politics, as Democrats made up for 30 years of suppressed spending by passing an almost $800 billion pork stimulus package. With the easy way politico’s and pundits have been throwing “trillion” into easy conversation, it seems that “trillion” is today’s “billion”, in that what was once a huge number is seen as nothing special.
Writing “$1 trillion” doesn’t seem that bad, right? How about now…
$1,000,000,000,000
That’s a lot of zeroes!
But a post on a mailing list got me thinking. Just how far could you go with a trillion US dollars? I’m not talking about buying passage, but literal distance.
Well, a US one dollar bill measures 6.14″ long, 2.61″ wide and 0.0043″ thick. For the metric types among us, bear with me here, okay?
- If you were to stack one trillion US dollars up, the stack would reach about 67,866 miles from the surface of the earth. If you stood the dollar bills on edge, like dominoes, they would wrap 2.75 times around the equator.
- If you were to lay them together along the long sides, the ribbon of money would stretch for 41,193,182 miles.
- If you were to lay them end-to-end, they would stretch for 96,906,566 miles. That’s a long way, even more so when you realize that would be from the earth to the sun, and almost 4 million miles beyond.
- If took that same 96 million mile string of dollar bills and wrapped them around the equator like a belt, it would encircle the earth 3,891 times and produce a band 16 inches thick.
- If you were to lay them out on the ground, 1 million dollar bills along each side, it would cover an area 41.1 miles by 96.9 miles, or 3,682.6 square miles. That’s almost enough to completely cover all land in Puerto Rico and Guam.
- A dollar bill weighs about one gram, so $454 would weigh one pound. One trillion dollar bills would weigh 2,202,643,171 pounds, or 1,101,321 tons. It would take 27,533 fully-loaded semi-trucks to haul the money to the bank.
- Finally, if you tried to withdraw $1 trillion from an ATM with the typical $200 transaction limit, you would have to punch your PIN in five billion times.
When you put it into terms relating to distance or area, a trillion dollars ceases to be a random construct.
And yes, you can go a long way on a trillion dollars. How about the Moon? Or Mars, perhaps?
