Archive: Opinions

Things are getting out of control. Most people understand hundreds and thousands, and not long ago a million became a common number that it was possible, though unlikely, one could win on a television game show. I think most people would have been happy with millions, but our governments were dealing with billions.

Before government got hold of billions the only person who really cared about it was Carl Sagan, when he famously coined 'billions and billions'. But he was talking about stars, and stars are cheap. Come to think of it, stars are free.  Billions and billions of dollars are expensive. Minimally that would have to be four billion dollars, right? But our governments were spending hundreds of billions.

 

Now that they got us into serious debt doing that they have decided to spend trillions.  A trillion dollars has 12 zeros.  Most people are stunned that the federal government can give away more than a trillion dollars, with more trillions in the proposed budget.  I am very nervous about this myself.  I lose sleep if I think I owe twenty three dollars and thirty cents.  The thought of spending trillions of dollars has got to be giving Secretary Geitner a lot of sleepless nights.

But it doesn't stop there.  Evil mathematicians have plenty more illions to throw at us.  After trillion there is quadrillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, undecillion, duodecillion, tredecillion, quattuordecillion, quindecillion, sexdecillion, septendecillion, octodecillion, novemdecillion, vigintillion, and centillion.  Then there is the googol and googolplex.  These numbers are so big that mathematicians had to invent a new way to write them so they wouldn't have to use all those zeros.

Here is what a centillion looks like:  $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

If you stacked a trillion one dollar bills the pile would be 78,914 miles high.  Just so you can wrap your mind around this, the moon averages 238,857 miles from earth.  That is 33.04% of the way to the moon.  So it follows that you could stack three trillion dollar bills, give or take, and have a solid stack of bills between the earth and the moon.

Having trouble wrapping your mind around that?  So am I.  Even factoring the moon's elliptical orbit, which means it may be anywhere from 225,622 miles away to 252,088 that's a lot of money.  So think about this.  It is about 3,447 miles from Lansing, New York to London.  You could make approximately 23 piles of one dollar bills that equal the distance from Lansing to London.

(I think that would be cool.  You could walk from here to London on those piles instead of having to take a plane or a boat.  Heck, that would save tons of money for tourists, and it would only take them about 36 days to walk it, figuring about four miles per hour and no rest stops.  A dollar bill is six inches wide, so you could have about four pedestrian lanes, two eastward and two westward.)

But wait a minute -- all the uncertainty about how much the school district is going to have to cut, depending on what the state does, what the county does, what the federal government does... and when they actually tell school districts... could that elliptical orbit thing explain why the school district has no idea how much it is going to have to cut?

----
v5i13