Opinion|JUST HOW LONG IS A TRILLION SECONDS?
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September 28, 1986
,
Section 4, Page
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To the Editor:
It occurred to me, reading Joseph Sawyer's letter on the national debt ceiling (Sept. 14), that I didn't know what $1 trillion is, let alone $2 trillion. Of course, I knew that a trillion is a thousand billion and that a billion is a thousand million. But I didn't really understand what that means. Knowing there are 12 zeros in a trillion didn't help much either.
Why not think of it in terms of seconds, I asked myself? A trillion seconds would have to be years, probably many years ago. I made a wild guess. As it turned out, I wasn't close. I found that 1,000 seconds ago was equal to almost 17 minutes. It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds. Therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709.8 years.
A trillion seconds ago, there was no written history. The pyramids had not yet been built. It would be 10,000 years before the cave paintings in France were begun, and saber-toothed tigers were still prowling the planet.
I was stunned. At first I thought I must have made a mistake, but a banker friend checked my figures and pronounced them accurate.
Was I alone in not knowing how long ago a trillion seconds was? I asked some of my neighbors what they would say if they were told they could have $1 trillion in one-dollar bills, so long as they agreed to initial each bill. Their answers were very similar. ''No!'' they said. When I asked why, they said, almost without exception, ''Because it would take me the rest of my life!''
We must all of us, especially our elected officials, stop thinking of a trillion seconds as merely a long time ago and a trillion dollars as just a lot of money. The next time our senators and representatives consider the Federal deficit and the cost of the arms race, they should allow themselves briefly to think of seconds instead of dollars. They might then picture, if they would, prehistoric man hunched in a smoke-filled cave, gnawing at the bones of a woolly mammoth. DOROTHY C. MORRELL Seattle, Sept. 18, 1986
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