Outside on a clear night one can see about two thousand stars with the naked eye. With 1 trillion dollars, you could buy all of those stars if each cost 500 million dollars.
Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way galaxy, the galaxy that is home to our solar system and just about everything we can see at night, contains about 200 billion stars. If each star cost just one dollar, with 1 trillion dollars you could buy 5 Milky Way galaxies.
Cosmologists contend that the entire observable universe contains only 100 billion galaxies — one tenth of a trillion.
1 trillion dollar bills stitched together end to end in a line would stretch about 94 million miles — a bit more than the distance from earth to the sun. 1 trillion dollar bills stitched together to form a quilt would cover an area about the size of the state of Connecticut.
1 trillion dollars in US quarters would have a mass something over 20 billion kilograms, or a weight of 25 thousand tons. A stack of 1 trillion quarters — 1.7 million kilometers tall — would extend from the center to the surface of the moon.
1 trillion dollars of gas at 4 dollars per gallon burned in a car that gets 20 miles per gallon would pay for a 5 trillion mile road trip. In the US, collectively we drive a total of about 2 trillion miles in passenger cars each year, according to US Department of Transportation statistics.
5 trillion miles is, along a straight line path, about the diameter of our solar system. Along a more curvy path, 5 trillion miles is about 200 million times around the earth.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded and first funded by the federal government in 1958. In it’s 50 year history, NASA has put men on the moon, launched space probes that have visited all the planets of our solar system, orbited space telescopes, space shuttles, and space stations, and has funded basic space-science research, training thousands of students (including yours truly). NASA has been allocated a total of 800 billion dollars over the past 50 years, 200 billion dollars less than 1 trillion dollars. This is in 2007 inflation-adjusted “constant” dollars.
Spending money at the rate of 1 dollar per second, 1 trillion dollars would support a spending spree nearly 32 thousand years long. Traveling at a rate of 186 thousand miles per second, a ray of light can make it from the center of the Milky Way galaxy to us here on earth in about the same amount of time.
If we borrowed 1 trillion dollars at 6% APR with terms similar to a conventional home loan the debt would accumulate interest at a rate of $1929 per second. If we paid the debt off at the rate of $2000 per second we could discharge it in about 56 years — a working lifetime. By the end of this massive loan we would have paid a total of nearly 3.5 trillion dollars, putting a tidy 2.5 trillion dollars in the coffers of whoever made us the loan.
