Very few humans can really visualise what one thousand is, let alone one million, one billion, and certainly not one trillion. This article aims to allow the visualisation of one trillion dollars, in terms of how it looks, and how it could be spent. It is not suggesting that one trillion dollars be spent in these ways, just trying to give a feel for what in means in practical terms.
Build a Stack of One Trillion Dollars
The United States dollar is 0.10922 mm thick. That means that ten one-dollar bills form a wad that is about 1mm in thickness. A stack of ten thousand one-dollar bills extends to about one metre, and one million dollars stacked up would reach a height of 100 metres- the distance that Olympic Sprinters can run in about ten seconds. One billion dollars stacked together would reach 100 km (60 miles) into space, and one trillion dollars would form a massive stack that extends 100,000 km into space - about one quarter of the way to the moon.
How Much Area Would One Trillion Dollars Cover?
The dollar bill has an area of 0.01034 square metres, so one hundred dollar bills could cover about one square metre. One thousand dollars could be used to cover one of the walls in one room of a typical family home. One million dollars could cover 10,000 square metres- about the area of one baseball pitch. One billion dollars could cover ten million square metres, or ten square kilometres, the size of three Central Parks. One trillion dollars could cover ten thousand square kilometres - about the combined area of Washington D.C., Rhode island, and Delaware.
How Could One Trillion Dollars Be Spent?
- Bill Gates' total wealth in 2009 was about $50 billion. One trillion dollars is twenty times that amount.
- Starting on the day Christ was born, spend 1 million dollars every day. Today, three quarters of the trillion would be gone, and 1 million dollars could be spent for another 730 years.
- $1 trillion is enough to give $3,000 to every man, woman and child in the USA. This is enough for each of them to insure their own automobile as well as insure their own home.
- $1 trillion would buy a facelift for every adult woman in the USA.
- Each of the 700,000 or so Physicians and Surgeons in the USA could be given over $1 million each.
- About one million mortgages could be paid off with $1 trillion. (The average mortgage is around $140,000).
- The Open Access Journal estimates that in 2003, Public Spending on Cancer Research in the USA was about $5 billion. $1 trillion dollars could fund cancer research in the USA for 200 years.
Summary of What $1 Trillion Dollars Means
Numbers in the order of one trillion dollars are used liberally in the media, and yet few people really comprehend the scale of the number. These examples show what $1 trillion looks like, as well as demonstrate what it means to real people.
