These days you cannot get through the day without hearing or reading about multi-billion dollar bail-outs and trillion dollar debt. It can be numbing, and after awhile, desensitizing to the point that some may yawn when they hear a politician call for "only one billion dollars" to bail out the Bounty Hunters of America or some other budding interest group promising to deliver votes in a future election.
So, how much is a billion or a trillion dollars? Well, U.S. paper currency is six and one-eighth inches long. Let's round the length to six inches to make the math simple. Want to be a millionaire? Lining up one million dollar bills equates to almost 95 miles, or roughly the distance from New York City to Philadelphia. How about a billion end-to-end dollar bills? That would be 95,000 miles or just about enough to trace the circumference of Earth four times. Let's keep going and see how far a line of a trillion dollar bills takes us. From the Earth to the Sun with about three million miles to spare!
Not shocked yet? Okay then, let's bring back the one-eighth of an inch that we trimmed off of the length of the bill and apply that to the billion dollar bill line. You get an extra 1,972 miles or nearly the distance between Boston and San Antonio. Small numbers add up big and big numbers add up huge.
No comments:
Post a Comment