There are 12 zeros in 1 trillion
As an avid gamer and content creator, I often deal with mind-bogglingly huge numbers. Let‘s explore what a "trillion" really means.
Trillion-dollar gaming industry
The gaming industry topped $200 billion in 2022, per Newzoo. Fortnite alone brought in $5.1 billion revenue last year. These numbers seem almost fake, even to me as an industry expert.
To conceptualize a trillion – the next level up – forget millions or billions. Stack a million dollars 1,000 times to get a billion. Now stack a billion dollars 1,000 times more. That‘s a trillion!
Here‘s how it looks:
1 million = 1,000,000
1 billion = 1,000,000,000
1 trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
So that‘s a 1 followed by 12 zeros, or 1012 if you remember high school math class.
Let me throw some crazy comparisons out there:
- $1 trillion = $1 million * 1 million
- 1 trillion seconds = 31,710 years
- 1 trillion pennies stacked reaches halfway from Earth to the sun
Trillions of players
As a streamer and YouTuber, my mind is often blown by how many people play games today.
There are an estimated 3 billion total gamers worldwide. That‘s nearly half Earth‘s population! Now imagine every single person on this planet played your game. How many cumulative hours logged would that be?
Well, 3 billion hours equals just 341,000 years. Barely a dent in 1 trillion seconds! And gamers definitely play way more than 1 hour each on average. Call of Duty logs over 6 billion hours played annually.
Even mind-melting totals like 6 billion hours played annually across all games begins to pale compared to visions of an entire civilization gaming for 1 trillion seconds straight!
My fellow gamers, a trillion is an totally unfathomable amount of game time. Like, you could reach the 1 trillion hour mark if every human being gamed nonstop since the first homo sapiens walked the Earth!
Googolplex gaming budget
Alright, let‘s jump some levels beyond trillion now.
As a thought experiment, imagine you‘re a video game streaming billionaire with unlimited funds to create the most epic, expansive, hyperrealistic open world title ever conceived by humankind.
To even scratch the surface, your budget should be…one googolplex dollars! A number so vast not even the world‘s most powerful supercomputers could print it out in full. We‘re talking 10 to the power of a googol here (1010100).
Obviously real-world economic constraints don‘t apply in this scenario. But it illustrates the sheer ungraspable enormity of a googolplex — a trillion is an absolute speck in comparison!
So in summary, there may not be enough zeros in the cosmos to budget my dream open world simulation game. But hey, one can dream big as part of a trillion-dollar industry!
