Oldrocker
Sunday 2nd October 2011 7:03pm [Edited]
Near my beloved Black Country in Wolverhampton
13,416 posts
Bill Bryson explains what makes a trillion . .
Imagine, if you will, you are in a colossal safe in which there is $1 Trillion in clean crisp dollar bills. Imagine further that someone tells you you can keep each dollar bill you sign and you manage to sign one dollar bill every second. How long do you think it will take you to sign each and every dollar bill in that safe? A few weeks? A year?
Allow me to explain.
Signing one dollar bill each second will make you $1000 richer after 17 minutes. After 12 full days of furious dollar bill signing without any interruption, you will be a millionaire. That obviously means you will have $10 million after 120 days and $100 million after 1200 days (just over 3 full years of dollar bill signing). Here's the great part. You will have signed enough dollar bills after 31,7 years to call yourself a billionaire and after almost 1000 years you will have signed enough dollar bills to be in Bill Gates' league. Fact of the matter is, only after 31,709.8 years, without any interruption, will you have signed enough dollar bills to own the trillion dollars in the safe.