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Abusing a Trillion                                                                                    

Posted at: Mar/26/2009 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: Common Sense,

Have you noticed, we are being barraged every day now with the term “trillion”. I get the feeling there is a cavalier expectation you can gloss over large amounts by wrapping them in the trillion ribbon. It is no longer a 2200 billion dollar budget, now it is a 3.5 trillion dollar budget. Maybe there is a presumption that this makes the number smaller and more palatable. One trillion is still one million millions…now that sounds like a lot! Some of this is leveraging the fact that most people have a rough time actually fathoming really large numbers. Then there is the argument that a whole lot of something that is not very big still isn’t very much. Let’s look at that one for a moment. We know that one second is not very much and most of us can’t even perceive of a single second. In the grand scheme of my day, ten seconds isn’t very much either. 100 seconds, that is less than 2 minutes and I can lose that waiting at a traffic light. It is easy to see where adding up a lot of something very small might still not end out to be very much. If you stack anything high enough you will eventually notice it. One trillion seconds, do the math. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, approximately 365 days in a year. A year is a nice big quantity we easily relate to. Throw a year in the middle of a room and like a grenade no one ignores it. One trillion seconds is roughly 31,700 years. 31,700 years ago our ancestors were hiding in caves and man’s history was yet to be written.

Don’t be fooled by the recent transition from million and billion speak to trillion speak. A lot is still a lot, and a trillion is a lot more.

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