Trillion Dollar Question

Every time I open the newspaper or turn on the TV, there's another story about massive amounts of money. Last week President Obama proposed a budget for fiscal year 2010 of nearly nearly $3.6 trillion.

I know a trillion is a huge number, but just how huge? Today I did some research to try to get my mind around how big a trillion is.

• According to the orders of magnitude, a trillion is 10¹², or 10 with 12 zeroes after it

• It's a million millions

• The MegaPenny Project made a cube of pennies (but had to use 1,000,000,016,640 to even things out). The cube measures 273 x 273 x 273 feet, and weighs 3,125,000 tons

• One trillion dollars could buy every person living in America 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies (I'd go for the Thin Mints!)

• A trillion seconds is 32,000 years

• One trillion dollar bills stacked one on top of the other would reach almost 68,000 miles into the sky, or about a third of the way from the Earth to the moon

• If you were given one dollar every second, it would take 317 centuries (31,700 years) to reach one trillion
  

• One trillion ounces is 83 million cans of soda