What is One Trillion?

On September 8, 2017 the National Debt rang the $20 Trillion Bell. The estimated US population is 326,474,013. That means every man woman and child in the USA owes $61,261. That means the around 4 million children born this year will owe more than $61,261 before they even open their eyes for the first time. I hope you are sitting down. On that day $300 Billion was added to the National Debt. In round figures that is over $10.00 for every man woman and child in the USA.

Back to our original question, what is one trillion?

The conventional wisdom says the universe is 13.8 billion years old, or the “big bang” occurred 13.8 billion years ago. One Trillion years would hold 72 of those 13.8 billion periods. If we could go back 0ne trillion years we would have to wait 986.2 billion years for the Big Bang. The entire history of our universe would fit into 20 trillion years 1440 times.

If we were to make a twelve month calendar covering one trillion years, a month would cover 83.33 Billion years. That means each month could contain six complete histories of our Universe. A day would cover 2.74 Billion years. That is a little over one half of our Earth’s history. An hour would cover 114.2 million years. Each minute would cover 1.9 Million years. Each second would cover 31,700 years.

In summary, the first 11 months and 26 days would be blank. The big bang that started our universe would not happen until two days after Christmas on December 27. Our Earth would not have formed until three and a half days later on December 30 around noon.

At the risk of overkill, if we now take that last SECOND of the last DAY of that twelve month calendar that covered one trillion years, each second would cover 31,700 years. If we take that last SECOND, just one SECOND, and convert it into a 24 hour clock. Each HOUR would last 1,320 years, Each MINUTE would last 220 years And each SECOND would last 3 years and 4 months. During the first hour around 1:00AM Stone Age artisans would be scrawling the oldest cave art at Lascaux & Chauvet France, and Homo erectus died out in Asia – replaced by modern man. SEVENTEEN hours later at around 6:00 PM Food production arises in Africa (sorghum, African rice & guinea fowl). The Egyptian calendar, regulated by sun and moon with 360 days, 12 months of 30 days each. At around 10:11 PM the first known writing appears.

Now let’s start working backwards. The World Trade disaster would have happened less than five seconds ago. WWII would have ended around 7 minutes ago. The Declaration of Independence was published around 22 minutes ago. However for our Federal Government One trillion dollars was just 7 months and 15 calendar days ago.