Nothing sneaks up on this pair.
Speaking of which, Winter snuck up on us, folks—without much warning, too. Our four-way irrigation thingy froze this weekend while we were out of town. Water spewed around the well for three days and two nights. I think there’s some irony here. What if I told you the seminar’s focus was on energy conservation?
Say this ain’t so, too. Old news now, but another $140 billion of porky stuff had to be included in that bailout plan before lawmakers could bring themselves to approve it. Hey, what’s another 100 bill when the National Debt is topping 10 trillion as we speak (10.2 trillion).
How many billions are there in ten trillion (10,000,000,000,000)? Sad to say, I think my brain needs more place holders. Just like the National Debt Clock in New York City, both of us done run out of space.
It’s not my fault. Numbers once reserved for the distance between heavenly bodies are now part of our daily lingo. I think it’s high time we went to scientific notation. Follow the link for a refresher course or better yet, here’s a quickie:
To write a number in scientific notation, put a decimal point behind the first digit, drop all those place holding zeroes, count up the dropped amount and put that number up in the air real small behind ‘x ten’.
The National Debt would look like this: 10.2 x 10″ Hmmm, still looks a bit unwieldy. Maybe we need Astronomical Units.
An Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from the Earth’s center to the Sun’s center or 92,955,807 miles. In other words, just one Astronmical Unit equals 92,955,807. If we divide our National Debt by this number, we should get the debt in Astronomical Units. Drum roll….the National Debt is 107,578 or let’s just say 108,000 AU. By the way, don’t try this with your hand-helds or adding machines. I found out the hard way that they don’t go up to ten trillion. (error error error)
Happy to say, at 108,000 AU our National Debt gets us out of the solar system and a bit beyond. From Mercury, it’s less than 1AU to Earth, from Venus a little over 1, and from Mars about 2.5. Jupiter clocks in around 5 and Saturn a little over 10. Uranus shoots above 19 with Neptune at 30 and Pluto 31.
No worries. We’ll just go to light-years. One light-year equals 5.88 million million miles or ten trillion kilometers. I’m a kilometer hater, folks, but there it is—the exact number we need, ten trillion. The National Debt is just a little over one light-year.
I don’t know about ya’ll, but I’m feeling a lot better about a National Debt of only one light-year. Our closest star friend, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years from the Sun. The Canis Major dwarf Galaxy is the nearest to our solar system and it’s 25,000 light-years away. Astronomers who hazard a guess say that the whole universe is a whopping 79 billion light-years across. I think I’ll stop there. (a joke)
By the way, folks, one of the things I was supposed to learn at the seminar was how to change my perception. And judging from this calculated discourse on the National Debt, I do believe that idea took.
