What’s 3 Trillion?

• Written out, a trillion is a one followed by 12 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000. That’s a million times one million, or a thousand times one billion. Multiply that times three and you have 3 trillion.
• Counting to 3 trillion at a rate of one number a second would take almost 95,000 years.
• One would have to circumvent the globe 120 million times to travel 3 trillion miles. Similarly, that would be some 17,000 round trips to the sun. The universe, 15 billion years old at the outside, would need another 200 such lifetimes to reach 3 trillion years.
• A trillion is a figure more commonly used when talking about outer space. A light year, the distance that light travels in a vacuum in a year, is about 6 trillion miles.
• There are about 6.8 billion people in the world, meaning that every living person would get $441 if $3 trillion was divided up. If the money was split among the 300 million Americans, everyone would take home $10,000.
• A person given $1 million a year to spend would need 3 million years to blow $3 trillion.

But mostly…

• Three trillion dollars is about what the federal government will spend this coming year for domestic and defense programs and benefit entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, according to President Bush’s latest federal budget proposal Monday. ($3.1 trillion, actually).

Source: Associated Press

UPDATE: Want to see what a trillion dollars LOOKS like? Click here.

UPDATE #2: Just heard this fact: 1 trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years.

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