Newsmakers throw around big numbers to get people’s attention. They used to speak in terms of millions and billions, but now trillions have entered the conversation.
With market capitalization, government debt, global wealth, and environmental costs measured in trillions, the need to expand how people think about such a large number is here.
We aren’t ready for it.
As an abstraction, trillions don’t seem that hard to grasp. We can appreciate big numbers regarding things we can’t see or act on.
For instance, there are five trillion molecules in a single glass of water, roughly 37 trillion cells in the human body, and 300 trillion atoms in a single strand of human hair. All well and good, because most of us don’t have much to do with life’s building blocks.
But once we are confronted with financial and social issues measured in trillions, the ability to grasp the human implications of such sizeable numbers quickly begins to deteriorate.
The problem is that trillions is so much bigger than billions that people have a hard time understanding how to appreciate the difference. To illustrate this point, consider this.
One million seconds equates to 11 days. A billion seconds is equivalent to roughly 32 years. But a trillion seconds is on a different order of magnitude altogether. A trillion seconds is equal to roughly 317 centuries.
Think about that for a minute. That’s 317 centuries compared to 32 years or 11 days.
Once numbers reach into the trillions, people have an increasingly difficult time grasping just how large such a number is. To make sense of large quantities, people typically visualize them.
Picturing a million dollars, for example, might involve imagining stacks or pallets of cash, just like in the movies. But we lack any reference for visualizing a trillion dollars – or a trillion of anything. It remains an abstraction we can’t wrap our heads around.
Without practical comparisons or visuals, people fail to appreciate the magnitude and implications of what such a big number represents. In the not-too-distant future, this will prove an impediment to making quality decisions involving big numbers.
Until then, leaders would be wise to remember that saying a trillion is 1,000 billions is easy to articulate but very hard to comprehend. Trillions is an awfully large number. It is so much bigger than a million. Let’s not take that for granted.
