There’s no reason at all I’m writing this. It certainly has nothing to do with national debt, that’s for sure. But, maybe you’re curious and you’d like an illustration anyway.
While I could use $1 bills for this to make the illustration crazier, I don’t think anyone picturing $35T would imagine it in $1s. So, while using $100s makes the stack 100 times smaller, I think you’ll agree it’s still sufficiently insane.
So…what would $35,000,000,000,000 look like in $100 bills? Well, we know that each bill is 0.0043” thick, so with that, it’s just simple math.
35,000,000,000,000, divided by 100 = 350,000,000,000
…multiplied by the 0.0043” thickness = 1,505,000,000 inches
…divided by 12, this = 125,416,667 feet
…which you can divide by 5280 feet to convert see that $35T in 100 dollar bills is a stack 23,753 miles high.
For perspective:
The Space Station, orbiting at a distance of around 260 miles over our heads. This would be 91 stacks of $100s that reach the orbit of the International Space Station.
Mount Everest is 29,032 feet tall. If you were going to count out $35T in $100s and your stacks were Everest-height, you’d need 4320 stacks
35 trillion seconds = 1.1 million years
Now you know why you’ll never see it written with all those zeroes.
