BRT did a study on how many boxcars would $15 billion and $12.8 trillion dollars fill and how much said money would weigh in a blurb titled Just a Follow Up. Now comes Visual Capitalist showing, in 3D, how much space $1 trillion (seen above) and $20 trillion (see below), the size of the US debt, would occupy. Interesting to say the least but ... because dollars are now bits and not paper, weight and size drops to nothing, something akin to the fact money is created from nothing and is backed by nothing, an irony that makes one laugh and cry at the same time while our once great nation slowly goes into the poor house. BRT
This is where things start to get dodgy. Once numbers get beyond the millions, we don’t really have any intuition, tactile familiarity, or comprehension of what they mean.
For example:
One million seconds = 12 days
One billion seconds = 32 years
One trillion seconds = 32,000 years
Going back in time a trillion seconds would place you well before written history, the building of the pyramids, and 10,000 years before the first cave wall paintings in France.
Our monkey brains don’t really know what to do with these giant abstractions, and so it helps to think about them in different ways, especially visually.
Interesting is it not?
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