I just finished watching an episode of 22 minutes and they were talking about how much debt the Americans are in. They used an analogy of "if a dollar was a second". If that's true, then 1 million dollars would be about 11.5 days. 1 trillion seconds would be 31,688 years.
Now if you look at wikipedia, "As of March 16, 2009, the total U.S. federal debt was $11,042,553,971,450.47". Now that number is 349,925 years. Even if you take the other possible, smaller "public" debt of 6.74 trillion, that still works out to 213,582 years.
It's a bit funny to try and change a number so big into something tangible to understand the scale of it, but it's scary that you end up with an equally large and abstract number. The scale just boggles my mind. To give some scale, the oldest fossil record of humans is from about 130,000 years ago.
The only difference is that a second is finite and a US dollar is relative to other currencies.
ReplyDeleteTrue. The actual value changes, but the big-ass number is still the same.
ReplyDeleteOr are you saying that an american second is different than, say, a british second? :-P
I think what you meant to say is that a second is constant, although I think Einstein would disagree. However it is kind of funny, saying that the second is finite and the US dollar isn't. They can just keep printing more. :)
ReplyDeleteI meant the value of a second is finite and the value of a dollar is not. Printing dollars only creates more dollars, eventually the value of each dollar will fall relative to other currencies because of the dilution.
ReplyDeleteSince a dollar cannot travel at the speed of light, I don't think we have to worry about relativity having an effect on the comparison. :P heh