Podcasts & RSS Feeds Most Active Stories Sat June 4, 2011 Any
Way You Stack It, $14.3 Trillion Is A Mind-Bender Originally
published on Sat June 4, 2011 7:23 am The U.S. government is
$14.3 trillion in debt. When we first neared the trillion-dollar
mark in 1981, President Ronald Reagan said that the height of
our debt amounted to a stack of $1,000 bills about 67 miles
high. That's somewhere in the thermosphere. Today, that pile of
$1,000 bills would be floating in space, more than 900 miles
above the Earth. There aren't any $1,000 bills in circulation
anymore, so here's an astronomical analogy about today's debt:
If you stack up 14.3 trillion dollar bills, the pile would
stretch to the moon and back twice. Unless you're Buzz Aldrin,
that's hard for most of us to visualize. So just how big a
number can our brains process? For help with this gargantuan
problem, we turned to our Math Guy, Keith Devlin of Stanford
University. He tells NPR's Scott Simon the biggest number human
beings can really comprehend is much