Until quite recently, only the odd astronomer threw around numbers in the trillions, leaving the rest of us behind with our thousands, millions and billions. We didn’t mind. We couldn’t grasp the meaning of a trillion anyway — the dictionary defines it as the number 1 followed by 12 zeroes, or 1,000,000,000,000.
But today, we can hardly pick up a newspaper without being asked to get our mind around a trillion somethings. But after those 12 zeroes the average brain stalls.
Just a few of weeks ago the White House announced that the U.S. budget deficit hit $1.42 trillion in the last fiscal year, three times the previous record. Within 10 years, the annual deficit is projected to reach $9 trillion.
Elsewhere, Google announced that its engineers passed a milestone when they realized that they had indexed a trillion URLs, or Web pages, although not all of them are consulted in every search. Google says it’s about relevance, not volume.
Some financial analysts expect Google, Inc., to be a trillion-dollar company in market capitalization within 20 years, the first in the world.
At least that would be a fitting outcome for a big-number outfit like Google, itself an accidental misspelling of “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeroes). Googol was coined in 1940 by the late American mathematician Edward Kasner after his 9-year-old nephew blurted it out as a funny name for that huge number. The Oxford English Dictionary still calls it a “fanciful” word. The rest is history: Stanford University graduate students registered it as their company name in 1997, accidentally misspelling it as “Google,” and it stuck.
At least the Google Inc. people were smart enough to reject “Ten Duotrigintillion” as a name, one of the mathematical designations for the googol.
You will hear of terabytes (trillions of bytes) kicked around in discussions of supercomputer history, but now even trillions have been surpassed in those circles. The IBM Roadrunner is capable of 1.71 petaflops (a quadrillion operations per second) and is known as the world’s fastest computer, unchallenged for the past year. After the peta prefix come exa, zeta and yotta — numbers you don’t want to think about.
Trillions are creeping into our lives in other ways. Recently, someone calculated that Americans had sent one another 750 billion text messages in the first six months of this year and the volume is creeping up to a trillion as you read this.
In the military hardware business, arms expenditure worldwide passed a trillion dollars for the first time last year, all suppliers combined.
Our desperate need to communicate or sell things has created a gusher of international e-mail traffic, now totaling about 1 trillion messages every two weeks, although about 70 percent of that is spam or unwanted solicitations.
And some excitement gripped star-gazers a couple of years ago when American scientists determined that the Andromeda Galaxy contains about one trillion stars. They layered 3,000 photographs from the Hubble telescope to confirm their estimates. In reporting the news, New Scientist didn’t say who counted the stars.
The sudden surge of trillions has pumped life into academia, where men and women with chalk on their clothes have been trying to help us understand these vast concepts. My favorite example is from a professor who calculated that counting to one trillion, second by second, would take 32,000 years.
If the vastness of a trillion still seems elusive, a few more illustrations may be helpful.
You would have to circumnavigate the earth 40 million times to reach a trillion miles, or travel to the sun and back over 5,000 times. Someone figured out that a stack of U.S. pennies equaling a trillion dollars would reach halfway to the center of our universe.
The democratization of trillion has become a cause of confusion outside of the United States, where numbers are sometimes defined differently, even in the English language. As one lexicographer puts it, “The American system of numeration above one million was based on the French system, but now the French system changed to correspond to the British and German systems.” Confused?
I’ll only say that a word of caution is in order for anyone writing very large checks in London. Some people in Britain still say “thousand million” for billion, and “billion” for the American “trillion.” In other words, if you want to pay someone a billion, make sure they don’t take a trillion out of your account.
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The New York Times
