Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Some news I read recently got me to thinking, which is usually a problem in itself!

However, this time it set me off on a series of minor calculations that has led to a rather astonishing conclusion, which I thought I might share with you all here.

First let me state that every approximation that I make is done on the conservative side, so that the final result is likely slightly larger than what I came up with as an answer.

The U.S. one dollar bill ($1.00) is just barely under four thousandths of an inch thick (0.004"), which is approximately equal to one-tenth of a millimeter (0.10mm), thus ten one dollar bills stacked flat on a hard surface is essentially one millimeter (1.0mm) tall and one hundred so stacked would then be ten millimeters (10.0mm) tall and worth $100 dollars.

Following from there, we soon get to where a stack one meter (1.0m) tall would be worth $10,000 dollars, such that if you could make the stack 1,000 times taller yet, it would be one kilometer tall (1.0k) and be the equivalent of ten million ($10,000,000) dollars.

Are you with me so far?

Assuming that you could make this hypothetical stack of one dollar bills to any height you wished, we now take huge leaps upward.

Making the stack reach to 100 kilometers high we have now reached one billion ($1,000,000,000) dollars, thus making the stack one thousand times higher still, that is one hundred thousand kilometers (100,000k) tall now brings us up to one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000).

That is one unbelievably tall stack of dollar bills equaling one HELL of a big number of dollars!!!

Now it gets really disturbing and totally bizarre.

What got me started down this "rabbit hole" of simple calculations, was reading that the National Debt of the good ol' USA has just surpassed the thirty-five trillion dollar mark .... that is $35,000,000,000,000.

Knowing that the Moon, in its orbit, is an average of 384,401 kilometers from the Earth, that would mean that you would have to stack one dollar bills from the Earth to the Moon about 9.1 times (and rapidly growing) to equal our current National Debt!!!

I'm sorry, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong and have made a mistake somewhere. But even working it out in such a logical fashion, this still makes it so incomprehensible as to be totally beyond surreal.

WOW ....... just ...... WOW!!!

Incredible numbers - I wonder that the US$ still has a value!
-When I was youg 1 $ was 4,5 swiss francs - today 1 $ is 87 swiss cents
no wonder with 35 billion national dept -
How much dept is that on ea. American?


Arnold

Incredible numbers - I wonder that the US$ still has a value!
-When I was youg 1 $ was 4,5 swiss francs - today 1 $ is 87 swiss cents
no wonder with 35 billion national dept -
How much dept is that on ea. American?


Arnold

Yes, it is a frightening number that is clearly beyond comprehension. But we are not alone in this pickle, and in fact are still in better shape than some other notable countries, if you figure it as a ratio against GDP.

Still, we are in very deep trouble, there can be no denying!!!