Grasping the Enormity of One Trillion Dollars

Trying to wrap your mind around the size of one trillion is like trying to visually perceive the entirety of human civilization – our brains simply didn‘t evolve to handle numbers and timescales this vast. But with some creative thought experiments, we can start to push the boundaries of comprehending a number most will never practically intuit – $1 trillion.

As a passionate gamer constantly awed by massive open game worlds, scaling one trillion dollars intrigues me. How many times could you lap the virtual worlds of massive RPGs like Skyrim or the Witcher with a trillion dollar budget? Let‘s explore some visualizations to twist our minds around this mega number…

Physical Representations

The most graspable visualizations of $1 trillion portray the physical space cash would occupy…

Piles of $100 Bills Overflowing Football Stadiums

Calculating the dimensions if you could print $1 trillion USD in $100 bills…

• Each bill is 0.0043 inches thick
• $1 trillion worth stacked would be 7.6 million inches high
• That equates to a 63 story skyscraper
• Laid flat, the bills would blanket 4,616 football fields
• The pile would weigh 110.5 million pounds – equivalent to 50,000 African Elephants

Now that‘s a lot of Benjamin Franklins! You‘d certainly earn the "Mile High Club" achievement trying to climb that towering stack of dead presidents.

Encrusting Global Monuments in Diamonds and Gold

What else could we coat with $1 trillion?

• You could pave 16,000 miles worth of road in $100 bills – enough to cross the continental US over 60 times
• 1 trillion pennies stacked would reach 811,000 miles high – past the moon with 100,000 miles to spare
• $1 trillion worth of $1 coins would weigh around 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers
• Constructing a solid cube of gold would result in a 55 foot structure weighing 227 million pounds

These physical visualization illustrate the immensity of this sum – Perceiving it digitally on a screen gives no justice to how much raw material one trillion dollars truly represents!

Timescales Beyond Human Conception

Another approach is scaling one trillion to units of time beyond normal human lifespans and history…

Count for 30 Millennia

Let‘s return to our counting visualization:

That‘s quite the counting marathon! It would take over 30 times longer to count to one trillion then all of recorded human civilization. Your numbers would start slurring by the first century hitting lunch break around the year 1100AD.

Moments Long Since Forgotten

Or think in terms of time since defining events:

• 13,800 years since earliest cave paintings
• 126,000 years since emergence of Homo Sapiens
• 3 million years since proto-chimp/human divergence

You‘d need to go back 3 million years to find someone that could have started counting dollars from the first pre-humans, and stil not reach one trillion in that timeframe.

Trying to mentally bracket off this vastness of time far exceeds our primate brains evolved in small hunter-gatherer tribes. But exercises in scaling to geologic eras and epochs at least pushes the boundaries of human mental conception.

Buying Up the Sums of Human Endeavors

Another conceptualization technique looks at what $1 trillion could purchase in terms of all human creations and resources…

Toppling Corporate Empires

We already highlighted how one trillion allows you to casually purchase massive companies like candies in the checkout aisle…

But consider that all US companies combined are valued around $49 trillion – making a trillion only 2% of corporate America. Or that yearly global economic production is valued around $100 trillion – meaning it would only take 10 years of collective human output to produce your personal cash stash.

10 years of the fruits of all labor by 7 billion people. That statistic should twist your mind!

Sweeping Up the Sums of Culture

What if we totaled up other less tangible assets?

• All music copyrights – $7.7 billion
• All films ever made – $1.3 trillion
• All books and audiobooks ever created – $500 – $900 billion
• All pieces of artwork sold at auction – $1.1 trillion
• All venture capital invested annually – $300 billion
• All scientific R&D yearly – $2 trillion
• All worldwide ad spend per year – $750 billion

You could essentially purchase the sum records of human culture and innovation in these categories and still have plenty left over for chips and guac.

In the virtual worlds of games I play daily, the sums and valuations bandied around seem so meaningless beyond gear upgrades. But even games mimicking reality pale in comparison to the actual accrual of wealth and resources occurring today at global scale.

Astronomical Scales

For comparisons from farther afield, astronomers regularly work on visualizing ginormous distances that start pushing the boundaries of human comprehension…

Spanning the Heavens

The diameter of our Sun is nearly 1 million miles across. With $1 trillion lined up in dollar coins side by side, you could make a path:

• 1/10th the width of our solar system
• Over 300 round trips to the moon
• 8 times the distance from Earth to Mars

Still just barely even denting astronomical distances between planets and stars measured in light years and parsecs.

Resting Among Giants

Another creative visualization overlays $1 trillion onto geographic markers viewable from space…

• It would blanket 1/5th the area of the Sahara Desert
• You could pave a path halfway around Saturn‘s rings in $100 bills
• Packed cubes of $1 trillion in pennies would almost fill America‘s Grand Canyon mile deep and several miles across

Juxtaposing human monetary abstractions next to celestial grandeur hints at scales far exceeding easy comprehension.

Perceiving Past Primal Origins

Trying to practically conceive the magnitude of a trillion dollars may simply be asking too much of our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer brains. Our neuronal architecture evolved in small communities economic activity on scales of seasons and sustenance.

My passion as a gamer is exploring unconstrained worlds – but virtuality masks the true enormity of resources and wealth accumulation happening today at global scale. $1 trillion far exceeds multiples of resources my primitive mental math can keep track of.

But I encourage all you passionate gamers reading this to try your own thought experiments! Identify vast game worlds or fantastical scenarios to recreate the thought-twisting enormity of this mega number. Use spatial reasoning from our evolutionary past to push the boundaries of perceiving $1 trillion dollars!