What Does Thirty-six Trillion Look Like? (Part 1 of 2)

The National Crisis No One Seems Willing to Address

A few weeks ago, John and I were sitting on my front stoop contemplating the size of our national debt, said to be in the neighborhood of thirty-six trillion dollars.  Actually, I was the only one sitting on the stoop.  John was rolling around on the walkway in front of the stoop.  I suppose I should mention that John is the big orange cat that lives at the end of the cul-de-sac down the street.  He doesn’t say much, but he’s a good listener.  He likes to be petted and scratched while he rolls around, purr, purr, purr.  His true passion is catching mice, at which he’s very accomplished.  While we were contemplating, a sound apparently emanated from the leaves beneath a nearby shrub, imperceptible to my ears but good-listener John immediately detected it, went to investigate, and emerged with a mouse held tightly between his jaws.  As usual, he trotted home to share his trophy with the humans he lives with, abandoning me to contemplate alone.

But that’s okay.  John has difficulty visualizing what a trillion of anything looks like, much less thirty-six of them.  He’s better at smaller amounts like one or two.  I admit that I too falter at visualizing what a trillion of anything looks like, and I would guess that most others have difficulty with it as well.  Is it just one more insignificant step in the series of “illions”: one million, one billion, one trillion?  Looking at it that way, it doesn’t seem very daunting.  Most of us think we have a pretty good handle on a million, and maybe a billion.  We’re told that some of the super-rich are billionaires, today’s version of the wealthy industrialists of the past like millionaires Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.  Who knows how much longer before we have trillionaires.

But what exactly does a trillion look like?  A debt of a trillion dollars doesn’t sound all that bad, but suppose we paid it down by one cent.  The remaining debt would then be nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.  Whoa!  While “a trillion” doesn’t sound like such an overwhelming number, one cent less suddenly sounds like a really, really big number.

I started to consider various measurements that might help me understand the immensity of first one trillion and then thirty-six trillion.  I thought maybe distance measurements might be helpful.  Most people know what a mile looks like, and if needed, a foot or an inch.  So, I decided to start with that.  Recognizing that a trillion is a really big number. I started big, or at least what I thought was big: the earth’s circumference.  Earth isn’t the perfect globe we picture it to be; its circumference varies depending on where it’s measured, so I used the purported measurement at the equator: 24,901.46 miles.  Obviously nowhere near a trillion, so I immediately converted to feet, then inches: 1,577,756,506 inches.  If you’re having difficulty deciphering a ten-digit number, that’s a little over one and a half billion inches, still not close to a trillion.  I started thinking in terms of fractions of an inch.  Scales divided into sixteenths of an inch are not that uncommon, but I thought I would invoke the metric system and go even smaller: millimeters.  There are 25.4 millimeters in an inch, so a millimeter is about two-thirds as wide as a sixteenth of an inch.  How many millimeters is the circumference of the earth?  According to my calculations, 40,075,015,242.  About forty billion millimeters.  Theoretically, if we had a tape measure a trillion millimeters long, we could wrap it around the equator almost twenty-five times.  If the tape measure was thirty-six trillion millimeters long, it could be wrapped around the equator almost nine hundred times.  I confess, it was still hard to visualize thirty-six trillion teeny tiny millimeters wrapped around the equator that many times.

What if we used the distance from the earth to the moon instead?  That varies as the orb circles the earth, but the average distance is said to be about 238,855 miles, or almost ten times the circumference of the earth.  Intuitively, millimeters will still be too great a measurement to be of much help.  Let’s think in terms of the thickness of a one-dollar bill which is about one tenth of a millimeter.  If I could stack thirty-six trillion one-dollar bills, they would reach all the way to the moon, not once, not twice, but nine times with enough left over for another stack stretching a little more than a third of the distance.  That’s the height and number of stacks of one-dollar bills that would be needed to pay off our national debt.  Incredible, and still hard to visualize.

Maybe instead of distance, a measurement based on speed might be more useful.  Sixty miles per hour probably won’t get us there, too slow, but we’ve all seen videos of rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral.  They go really fast.  To escape earth’s gravity, they need to achieve a speed of about 25,000 miles per hour.  That was the speed needed by the Saturn Five rockets to propel the Apollo astronauts to the moon.  How long would it take to go a trillion miles?  Oh, my gosh!  Forty million hours?  Could that be?  That’s 4,566 years; 45 centuries!  To travel thirty-six trillion miles, we’re no longer talking centuries; we’re talking millennia.  Over 164 millennia!

Do we need to think in terms of something much faster?  What if I used the speed of light?  That’s the holy grail of speed; there’s nothing faster.  We’re told that the speed of light is roughly 186,280 miles per second.  Who am I to quibble?  The sun is about 93 million miles from earth, so it takes a beam of light from the sun a little over eight minutes to reach earth.  Whatever we observe happening on the sun, like a solar flare, actually happens about eight minutes before we’re able to observe it.  That fact alone is hard for some to wrap their head around, but let’s stick with it.  Pluto, the once-upon-a-time most distant planet from the sun, is about 3.7 billion miles away.  While it takes sunlight about 8 minutes to reach earth, it takes almost five and a half hours to reach Pluto.  But even distant Pluto isn’t close to a trillion miles away.  To travel a trillion miles would take a beam of light 62 days.  To travel thirty-six trillion miles would take 2,237 days, more than 6 years.  And this is at the speed of light!

Hmm.  Maybe speed isn’t such a good measurement to use either.  Maybe area would make things easier.  I found a source that indicated that the earth’s surface covers 196,900,000 square miles or 126,016,000,000 acres.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  Just a factor of eight needed to reach a trillion, but much smaller units needed to truly get a grasp of thirty-six trillion.  How about square feet?  We all know what a square foot looks like, twelve inches on a side.  There are 43,560 square feet in an acre and 640 acres in a square mile, so a trillion square feet equals 35,570 square miles.  The state of Maine covers 30,866 square miles.  Add the state of Connecticut at 4,845 square miles. and we have 35,711 square miles, slightly more than needed.  I can look at the world map hanging in our study and see that that doesn’t seem all that big.  Of course, I would need a microscope to see a square foot on that map, so maybe the area is larger than it appears.

How large of an area would be needed to equal thirty-six trillion square feet?  Well, let’s see.  That would take all the states east of the Mississippi River, plus all the states that line its west bank, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, plus one third of Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota.  Again, it doesn’t look very big on the map, but maps can be misleading.

I suppose I could go on and on with other examples and other units of measurement, weight maybe, or volume.  There are sixteen ounces in a pound, two thousand pounds per ton.  Thirty-six trillion ounces would still be over a billion tons, 1,125,000,000 tons to be exact.  What weighs a little more than a billion tons?  How about the Empire State Building?  That’s a pretty healthy chunk of steel and concrete.  Not even close.  Only 365,000 tons.  We would need over 3,000 of them.  How about Hoover Dam?  At 6,600,000 tons a far-sight heavier, but we would still need 170 of the massive structure to get to thirty-six trillion ounces.

What if we use liquid ounces instead?  Maybe that would work better.  We often see comparisons using the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, so it’s kind of a recognized reference point.  An Olympic swimming pool holds 660,000 gallons of water, and there are 128 ounces in a gallon.  I’ll skip past the calculations here to just say that it would take 426,136 Olympic sized swimming pools to hold thirty-six trillion ounces of water.  You read that right, over four hundred thousand.  Placed end to end, they would stretch more than halfway around the world.  Now we’ve combined measurements in both volume and distance, and it’s still hard to visualize thirty-six trillion of anything.

The point is that it’s simply impossible for anyone to conceive of what a trillion dollars looks like.  It’s simply incomprehensible.  And our country is in debt to the tune of thirty-six trillion dollars.  And maybe that’s the problem.  The number is so mindboggling that no one has the slightest understanding of just how much financial trouble we’re in, much less how to resolve it.  It’s the national crisis no one seems willing to address.  Oh, it gets mentioned often enough, lip service mostly, but no one seems committed to addressing the problem.  If we continue on this path, without question the country will go bankrupt.

Major league baseball parks have a warning track that stretches along the far edge of the outfield.  When a player fielding a fly-ball reaches the warning track, he knows he’s about to hit the wall.  The question is: have we reached the warning track, or have we already slammed into the wall?

Tune in again next week for Part Two….