I recall when I was 7 years old that I wanted to count every page of my Webster’s New Collegiate dictionary that I had recently received. I was unsure if I had ever seen a book so thick in my life! I remember sitting down in the recliner and starting to count. I reached about 150 pages before being called in for dinner, making sure I bookmarked right where I left off. I went back to this task after dinner and reached almost 400 pages before realizing the Dukes of Hazzard was about to come on. Maybe it was because I had forgotten to bookmark my spot, but I never went back to complete this challenge.
I think back on that and wonder, why in the world did I decide to count the pages? I mean, there are page numbers so I could have just looked at the bottom of the page and checked how many it had. Was I trying to understand the concept of hundreds vs. thousands? I recently asked my daughter how many days 1 million seconds was. After thinking about it for a moment, she said 1 week. Hey, not bad! 1 million seconds is just over 11.5 days. I then asked how many days 1 billion seconds would be. Hmm, this one was a little more difficult, but she said about 1 month. Oops, good try but it's actually 31.7 years. I of course had to then follow up with the real kicker…how long is 1 trillion seconds? At this point, it became befuddling and resulted in the resigning answer of 100 years. Not even close, try 31,700 years. If you started the clock back in the Upper Paleolithic era around the time humanoids first showed up in Ireland, you would just now be getting to 1 trillion seconds.
It seems most people have a handle on what a million is. Our minds can grasp that number fairly well. Some people even have many multiples of that in their bank account. A billion gets a bit harder, although maybe not for the nearly 2,800 billionaires on the planet. Once you get into the trillions, our minds have a tough time understanding how big of a number that really is. Hey, it’s only 1000 billion…right?? The old Powers of 10 gets you every time.
In the financial industry, we deal with big numbers all the time. The terms millions and billions are tossed around like they are nothing. Even the word trillion has become a more common term within the financial lexicon (i.e. AAPL market cap of $2.4 trillion, $3.5 trillion spending bills, etc). Let’s look at some numbers and try to add some perspective by converting them to a length of time as if the numbers represented seconds:
Number of people in the USA: 330 million (10.4 years. Our seconds clock would have started in early 2011 around the time of the Japanese tsunami.)
Number of people on Earth: 7.6 billion (241 years. The seconds clock would have started in 1780, during the American Revolutionary War’s Battle of Hanging Rock.)
Number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy: 100 billion (3170 years. The clock begins around 1150 BCE around the end of the Shang Dynasty in China.)
Jeff Bezos’ net worth: $200 Billion (6,340 years. Jeff would have had to start counting his money in 4300 BCE around the time the Egyptian calendar was started.)
Federal Reserve balance sheet: $8.4 trillion (266,000 years. Our clock starts around the time Neanderthals started roaming Eurasia. Is Jerome Powell somehow related?)
United States National Debt: $29 Trillion (920,000 years. We would have started counting next to some of the first fires used for cooking.)
That was quite the brain workout but I am sure you now have a full understanding of what a trillion is! I'm not quite sure that I am any closer to understanding the real significance of a trillion. I guess I'll go finish counting the pages of my Webster’s dictionary. Ahh, heck with it, I checked the page numbers and it’s 1532 pages long. But if I had counted them, it would have only taken me about 26 minutes.
Eric