Star Spangled Banter – Trillions

Nathan Miron

You can say one thing about language: It changes constantly. New words are added, and old ones go in and out of fashion. It seems that a new “old word” has come into fashion, and you hear it in almost every recent news broadcast. That word is trillion. Of course, you have heard the word all of your life, but there was rarely a situation where it was used in everyday conversation. But now – well, you hear it so often that most people don’t realize they really don’t know what it means.

One trillion is written as 1,000,000,000,000, or 10¹². In other words, it is a digit followed by twelve zeroes. But that doesn’t give anyone an appreciation of just how big a trillion really is. For that matter, few people appreciate how big a billion is, and a million has come to mean almost nothing. It was not so long ago that a millionaire was considered to be a really wealthy person, but now millionaires are swarming out of the woodwork and even billionaires are becoming much more commonplace.

To give you an appreciation of these numbers let’s start off really small – let’s say, a thousand. Imagine you have a timer that counts one number each second, never stopping to breathe, to be wound, to change batteries, or for any other reason. How long would it take to count to a thousand?

The answer, of course, is a thousand seconds, but we’re not accustomed to thinking that way. We tend to think in terms of more familiar units. If someone asks you the distance from Miami to Seattle, the odds are you would not say “213 million inches,” but rather, “about 3,360 miles.” A thousand seconds is much more meaningful when it is expressed as 16.7 minutes, or 16 minutes, 40 seconds.

How long would our counter take to reach a million? A million seconds (almost 278 hours (better, 11.6 days)). A billion? Now we’re getting into really large numbers. It would take almost 32 years! And a trillion? One thousand times that long, which is nearly 32,000 years.

If you take the thickness of a dollar bill to be something on the order of 1/100th of an inch, a trillion dollar bills would make a stack 157,820 miles high! It would reach 2/3 of the distance to the moon. And here we are, little, insignificant human beings, with a national debt (as of September 30, 2008) at least 1,578,200 miles high, which is more than 6 times the distance to the moon. Small wonder the government is running out of money!

But to an astronomer, even trillions are for pikers. The distance from the earth to the sun – a relatively close neighbor, is about 93 million miles. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. If it could travel in curves it could make almost seven trips around the earth’s equator every second. But sunlight still takes about 8 minutes to reach us. Light travels 5.8 quadrillion miles in a year (a quadrillion is a thousand trillion), and the nearest star outside of our solar system is a bit less than four light-years away, or approximately 15 quadrillion miles. That is just the distance to our nearest stellar neighbor, and the average distance between stars in our neck of the woods is approximately the same. From there it just gets bigger.

It should make you swell with pride to realize that in spite of our insignificant size, we human beings have the intelligence to learn so much about the magnificent universe we call home (for all we know, the only species anywhere that has been able to do so?)

If all this makes you feel insignificant, here is something else to ponder: The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest galaxy beyond our Milky Way, and on a clear, dark, moonless night a person with slightly better than average eyesight can barely see it faintly glowing, at the very limit of visibility. It is 2.2 million light years away – the most distant object that can be seen with the naked eye. When you look at that dim smudge you are seeing light that has traveled for 2,200,000 years, and nothing in the entire universe stopped it until it hit your eyeball. Now, if that doesn’t give you a feeling of power, I don’t know what will!

© Nov. 2008 by Nathan B. Miron, Ph.D.