The teaser for NPR's Science Friday notes that President Bush's new budget is $3.1 TRILLION dollars and attempts to put that number in perspective.
One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 — 10 to the 12th power, or a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand. To put things in perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion.
$1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States. A trillion barrels of oil would — at current consumption levels — fuel the world for about 33 years.
-- Jim Grinstead
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