Picturing $700 Billion

 Photo Source: TW Collins

Often members of the green community take an enormous number or figure (that is hard to fathom if you are not a math professor) and simplify the number to a scale that is easier for everyone to comprehend.

An example of this analysis would be:

600 million plastic bottles are used per day.  That is equivalent to 694 plastic bottles used every second.

Similarly, Big Numbers (a contributor to The Huffington Post) did an analysis of the figure used in the recent economic bailout.  So how much is $700 billion?

1 one dollar bill is .0043 inches thick.  1000 one dollar bills ($1000) stacked is 1000 times thicker at 4.3 inches.  One million is one thousand thousands.  This stack of $1 million (in one dollar bills) has the thickness of 4300 inches, which is 358.3 feet – the size of a football field.  One billion is one thousand millions.  This stack of $1 billion (in one dollar bills) has the thickness of 358,333.3 feet, which is 67.866 miles – or the driving distance from New York City to Milford CT.  The economic bailout is 700 times the amount of a billion at $700 billion.  If this figure is represented in one dollar bills stacked together it would stretch 47, 506.2 miles – the distance to circle the earth 1.9 times.