What is 1 Trillion?

One Trillion is sort of this inconceivable number.  We really don’t have a good grasp of what it really means.  Or at least I didn’t know what it meant until a friend of mine gave me this awesome illustration.

Basically, take the number in question and  put it into terms that we can understand.  It can’t be money, because most folks never reach a billion and it takes most folks a lifetime to get a million.  So my friend showed it to me on a calculator in terms of time.

What does that mean?  Simply take a calculator and take 1,000,000,000,000 and convert that into seconds then divide it by 60 to get the number of minutes.  Then divide by 60 to get the hours.  Then by 24 to get the days.  And so on.

If you do the math, 1,000,000,000,000 seconds of time is equal to over 317 CENTURIES!  Yes, centuries… 100 years each.

That means even if we paid $1 per second it would take over 317 years to pay back $1 trillion.

Even one billion is huge.  One billion seconds is 31.7 YEARS.

At a $1 per second, that is equivalent to $3,600 per hour or $7,488,000 per year.

If this seems like I did the math incorrectly, check it for yourself.  Put it into a spreadsheet with column labels so that you can clearly see if for yourself.

By the way, try typing 1,000,000,000,000.  I had to double check it a couple of times to make sure I had the right number of zeros.