TRILLION: We recently heard from a reader who’s been enthused with our ’Round the Squares lately.
Ken Gerg enjoyed the RTS where we gave some context to just how much one billion is. A billion is a thousand million. For example, it would take you more than 95 years to count out loud to a billion. A billion pennies stacked on top of each other would be nearly 870 miles high.
He suggested we take a look at just how much one trillion is. It’s a lot.
Most of the time the only things counted in the trillions are things like national debts (ours is $36.2 trillion) and gross domestic products (GDPs) of large economies like the United States and China.
A trillion is $1,000,000,000,000. That’s 12 zeros. One trillion is one million times one million.
For quick context, it would take approximately 31,709 years to count to one trillion, and a stack of a trillion pennies would stretch more than 3 times the distance between Earth and the moon — 944,484 miles.
There are 37.2 trillion cells in the human body. One trillion sheets of copy paper laid end to end would circle the earth 2,375 times.
Our galaxy contains an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars, with trillions of galaxies in the observable universe. Internet traffic can be measured in trillions of bytes. A trillion water drops would fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
A trillion steps would send you to the moon and back nearly 1,000 times.
Thanks to Microsoft Copilot for the math assist — we’re writers. At an average of 100,000 each book, one trillion words would be about 10 million books. That’s a library we’d like to visit.
