What is the best way to visualize one trillion dollars?

Question

The US national debt was 16,230,035,314,851.93 dollars, as of November 4, 2012 at 01:41:48 AM GMT. That is 16.2 trillion dollars (and change). 

One trillion dollars. Just looking at the 1 and 12 zeros, or just the word trillion, it doesn't seem like that much. What is a few zeros between friends. One trillion dollars is a massive amount of money. That is 1,000,000,000,000 dollars. Put it into perspective. If you could amass one trillion, one dollar bills, what would it look like? (or one trillion of anything else if you would rather.)

One US 1 dollar bill:
   Dimensions: 2.61 inches wide x 6.14 inches long x 0.0043 inches thick
   Volume: 0.0000398780208333 cubic feet.
   Weight:1 gram.

For instance, one trillion one dollar bills would form a stack 67,866.16 miles high.


1,000,000,000,000 dollars x (0.0043 inches/dollar) x (1 foot / 12 inches) x (1 mile/5280 feet) 

=  67,866.16 miles

 
Show your math and prove that you are not pulling numbers out of places the sun doesn't shine.

xomoc · Accepted Answer

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/calculations.html

I would like to know where the tipping point is. At what point will US no longer be able to service it's debt, 40 trillion a 100 trillion. This year so far the US has paid 360 billion to service this dept.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm

Anonymous · Answer

It almost always couldn't with a steady currency. Through 2020, the national debt might be 90% of the U.S. GNP and via 2080 GNP it's going to be as a minimum 300% of the GNP. By way of that factor the only technique to reap that kind of debt is to print cash, due to the fact that no person could tax their means out of it or find sufficient bond holders. If the buck collapses like Zimbabwe's forex, which it could with all these Democratic entitlements which can be the true explanations for the countrywide debt, it might be within 200 years.

? · Answer

I once saw a million dollars in cash. It was in the lobby of a hotel in Las Vegas, a bunch of $100 bills in a plexiglass drum about 4 feet in diameter and 6 feet long. However, a million dollars can actually fit in a fat briefcase if the bills are fresh from the bank in packets of $10,000. The packets aren't that big, and you only need a hundred of them.

So take a million of those briefcases and build them into a cube: 100 briefcases long, 100 briefcases wide, and 100 briefcases tall. That's it.

Ed Smurf · Answer

Even if the trillion dollar was in 100 dollar bills it would still weigh a little over 11,013 tons. In 1 dollar bills it would weigh a little over 1,101,321 tons. The national debt in 1's would weigh a little over 17,874,449 tons

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What is the best way to visualize one trillion dollars?

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