How Much is a Trillion Dollars?

(via Megan McCardle)
"A trillion is, in some sense, a meaningless number. Perhaps this is a problem with inflation in both our currency and the size of our government--the spending figures are now beyond any normal person's imagining. In the comments to another thread, two readers try to put some emotional weight to these hefty numbers

Wiredog says:

A couple years ago someone asked me, as an aid to visualizing the budget, how many transport flights it would take to move $1T worth of $100 bills.

So $1T is 10B $100 bills.

10B grams is 10M kg

120,000 kg is the capacity of the C5 Galaxy aircraft. So it would take 84 flights to move $1T in $100 bills.

The Galaxy C5 is (she said with stunning understatement), not a small aircraft:

Meanwhile, Colonel Sanders notes:

Imagine you're given $1T on the day Jesus Christ was allegedly crucified.

You spend $1M per day, every day, 365 days a year without stopping for any reason.

As of today, you would still need around 700 years to be completely out of money.

Don't worry, though--I assume when you do run out, there will be a government program to top up your funds."