NYC National Debt Clock runs out of digits
NEW YORK, Oct. 8, 2008 -- One year ago today, the stock market reached an all-time high (14,164). In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the nation's growing debt.
As a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been switched to a figure — the "1" in $10 trillion. It's marking the federal government's current debt at about $10.2 trillion. The Durst Organization says it plans to update the sign next year by adding two digits. That will make it capable of tracking debt up to a quadrillion dollars. The late Manhattan real estate developer Seymour Durst put the sign up in 1989 to call attention to what was then a $2.7 trillion debt.
How Much is a "Trillion"?
Wikipedia/NPR/NASA/Carpe Diem
If you spent a $1,000 a day, how long would it take you to spend a trillion dollars? The answer may surprise you: 2.7 million years. If you took a stack of hundred dollar bills, a million of them would be four feet high. A billion would be three Sears Towers high. A trillion would be 789 miles high (or 144 Mt. Everests stacked on top of each other), to say nothing about the National Debt. We get closer to a Buddhist nahuta (a staggering number) or a kalpa (a bogglingly long aeon).
Technically it is either of the two numbers (see long and short scales for more detail):
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one million million million; 10 to the 18
th; SI prefix:
exa-) -- for all
long scale countries - increasingly rare meaning in English language usage but frequent in many other languages.
But how much is it really?
Talk of the Nation, 2/8/08: The 2009 budget proposed this week by President Bush weighs in at $3.1 trillion [raising the national debt to $10.2 trillion]. But just how large is a trillion, anyway? It is a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, or a million million. To put it into perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion. $1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States.
Author David M. Schwartz talks about other ways to visualize a trillion, and how to wrap our heads around really big numbers. If we started counting from one to a trillion at the rate of one number per second, it would take 317 centuries before we were done.
A trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet [we know of] could read or write. Neither the Roman Empire nor the ancient Chinese dynasties had yet come into existence. None of the founders of the world's great religions today had yet been born.
Six trillion seconds equals 189,276 years.
Along with the nearly six trillion miles in a light-year, there are nearly five trillion dollars in the current U.S. national debt [uh, make that 10 trillion and growing thanks to Bush]. Is it any wonder even Republicans in Washington are concerned?
If one were to count the National Debt at the rate of one dollar per second, one would have to use a mechanical counter to click off the digits. If the counting were done out loud -- "one, two, three..." -- there would be numbers whose names are so large, it would take more than a second of clock time to pronounce them. For example, "nine hundred and ninety nine billion, nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine" takes about 9 seconds to pronounce.
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