One is easy. Look in the mirror. You are one.
Or a single basketball, tossed onto a court.
Ten, no trouble. Ten players on that basketball court, running and passing that orange ball, sneakers squeaking.
A hundred … picture a grid, 10 on a side. Easy to imagine that. Or the crowded hall outside the gym door. Or a box of Kleenex, 100 tissues to the box. The thin professional boxes.
A thousand … more challenging. Not a figure that had much practical value during 99% of the 300,000 years of human history, where counting was One, Two, Three and Many.
A thousand people crowd that high school gym to watch the game. A thousand days are almost three years. With its broadcast antenna, the Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall.
I like to do the math. To try to imagine numbers. So when the market capitalization of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, hit $4 trillion on Monday, after rising 65% in 2025, my first thought was “What’s a trillion, anyway? Can that figure even be imagined?”
The best approach seemed to work our way up slowly, by powers of 10.
For 10,000, we can stick with basketball —about 10,000 spectators at an average WNBA game: 9,800 per game in 2024, over 11,000 in 2025. One week contains 10,800 minutes.
For 100,000, we need to shift sports, and pack Soldier Field way past the 60,338 fan there last Saturday to see the Bears overcome Green Bay, to the crowd cheering the 1926 Army-Navy game — at least 100,000. Wall to wall fans, standing in the aisles, on the roof.
A million? The population of Fort Worth, Texas. The center of the sun is about 1 million degrees, Celsius. Maybe your net worth — with the skyrocketing stock market, and inflation, there are some 24 million millionaires in the United States, the word no longer indicating extravagant wealth — no mansions, no yachts. Just some comforting ballast to keep your ship from flipping in the next storm.
Ten million? Combine the area of the two largest countries in the world, Russia and Canada, and you have about 10,456,000 square miles.
One hundred million? The distance from Earth to the sun is close, averaging about 93 million miles.
One billion. Your heart pumps about a billion gallons over 25 years. And billionaires are the new millionaires. Those people are rich. If you spend $10,000 a day indulging your every whim, it would take you 2,730 years to burn through that cash. Which explains why the very rich, such as Elon Musk, tend to become unglued. The richest man in the world, he’s worth $725 billion.
Closing in on a trillion right there. How to conceive of a trillion? Light zips along very fast — taking 8 minutes and 20 seconds to traverse the 93 million miles from the sun to Earth. To travel a trillion miles, light takes about two months.
A shame we aren’t on the metric system. The Earth’s volume is 1,083,208,840,000 cubic kilometers.
I thought I’d cheat, and consult Google’s Gemini AI, since its soaring market value raised this subject, asking, “How to visualize a trillion?”
AI answered immediately:
“One trillion $1 bills stacked would reach about 67,866 miles high, enough to go to the Moon and back more than once.”
See the problem with that? The 67,866 miles part is accurate, if a dollar bill is 0.0043 inches thick, as advertised. That isn’t wrong.
The “enough to go to the Moon and back” is way off, however. The moon averages about 238,000 million miles away. AI completely botched its distance from Earth, a fairly well-known figure.
As to how a service that is so frequently and spectacularly wrong can also be so widely embraced and valuable, well, such are the times we live in. Being consistently mistaken, even lying continually, is a feature, not a flaw, the reason why certain individuals and groups thrive. Because people buy it. They don’t care.
I urge caring. It’s worth the effort. Try to think for ourselves and question what’s ladled on our plates. There’s pressure not to, from both the feel-don’t-think Left, with their crystals and flights of fancy, and the close-your-eyes-and-do-what-we-say Right, who believe facts are whatever they dictate them to be today.
The choice is to abandon fidelity to truth. Or to take personal responsibility for figuring this stuff out. That takes effort, but I recommend it. Because once you let other people do your thinking for you, you’re lost. Do the math. Check your facts.
