CURRENT EVENTS
How Big Is Two Trillion?
Congress has apparently assembled its response to bail out the economy, an economy that stands hunched over like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. The price tag is two trillion dollars.
When I heard this, I couldn’t sleep. I’d just written a blog post a couple months back about how much one trillion dollars is. Here’s what I was thinking that kept me awake.
The earth is 25,000 miles in circumference. So, I imagined the following “what if” scenario. If you had a superjet that could travel 25,000 miles an hour, it would take one hour to fly around the world. It would take four hours to fly around the world four times which would be 100,000 miles.
Now assuming this jet never stopped to refuel or change pilots or whatever here is what we would see.
4 hours = 100,000 miles
40 hours = 1,000,000 miles (1 million miles)
400 hours =10 million miles
4000 hours = 100 million miles
40,000 hours = 1000 million miles (1 billion miles)
400,000 hours = 10 billion miles
4,000,000 hours = 100 billion miles
40,000,000 hours = 1 trillion miles
