How big is a Trillion anyway?

Making the news over the last few months is the term “trillion.” As in the budget deficit has ballooned to $1.5 trillion dollars, and the budget debt has grown to $12 trillion dollars.

The thing I’ve noticed in the tech industry is that we tend to the micro and nano; there is so much value in making something smaller and cheaper... thank you Gordon Moore and, quite frankly, Sony for driving this point home.

I’m a huge fan of visualization technologies as a tool to better understand and communicate the esoteric. Thankfully some smart people have now given us new ways to visualize the enormously large “trillion.” Consider:

A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
A million minutes ago was – 1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes ago.
A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.
A million hours ago was in 1885.
A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth.
A million dollars ago was five (5) seconds ago at the U.S. Treasury.
A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Treasury.
A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians
can use the term in conversation... probably because they
seldom think about what they are really saying. I’ve read that
mathematicians do not even use the term trillion! 
Here is some perspective on TRILLION:
 Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000. 
The country has not existed for a trillion seconds. 
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds. 
One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
Thanks to Tysknews for this wonderful illustration. This was taken from: http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Taxes/million.htm

Want to SEE a trillion dollars? Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxU2IqhnjM&feature=related