You Have No Idea What a Trillion Dollars Is—and We Have Proof

Picture a line with $1 million on the left and $1 trillion on the right. Where would you place $1 billion?

$1 billion is all the way on the left, crunched up against $1 million—and nowhere close to $1 trillion. But research shows that many people follow their intuition and treat the numbers as evenly spaced, placing a billion roughly halfway between a million and trillion.

As it turns out, $1 trillion is such a large number and so far beyond the human imagination that we can’t wrap our minds around it. 

A trillion is a thousand times more than a billion, but let’s be honest: I could have told you it was a million times more and you probably would have believed me. 

Not long ago, the word trillionaire only appeared in The Wall Street Journal as hyperbole. It was an obviously exaggerated way of describing an inconceivable fortune—like calling someone a bazillionaire. But now that SpaceX is going public, it might just be something we call Elon Musk. 

In a way, it’s fitting that the world’s first trillionaire could be minted by a company with hopes of sending people to destinations unfathomably far away, since the sheer magnitude of a trillion is also impossible for us to fathom. 

So let’s make it possible. 

A million seconds ago was about two weeks ago. A billion seconds ago was in 1994, when “Pulp Fiction” was about to open in theaters. What about a trillion seconds? 

Whatever number is in your head, you might want to add some millennia—because a trillion seconds ago was back in the Ice Age. 

Here’s another way to comprehend the incomprehensible scale of a trillion dollars. 

Let’s say you began stacking pennies—first 10, then 100, then 1,000. Let’s also say the tower of pennies stays intact as you keep piling them higher and higher until they reach a million.

Start in New York.

1 million pennies is about a mile high, stretching into the clouds.

1 billion pennies is nearly 1,000 miles.

That's nearly the distance from New York to Cape Canaveral, Fla.

1 trillion pennies? That’s a flight to the moon…

…and back.

Twice.

Back on this planet, where the mere thought of trillions can break our brains, I called David Landy, a Netflix data scientist and Indiana University adjunct professor of psychological and brain sciences, who studies the perception of abstract ideas and quantities. 

“We are living in a world we are not built to understand,” he told me. 

To survive in that world, he explained, we have developed systems that are remarkably successful—except when they’re not. In this case, that means shrinking gigantic numbers down to basic words that anyone can understand: a million, a billion, a trillion. 

“They come in a list and you’re used to that list,” Landy said. “It’s as easy as one, two, three.” 

What’s harder to understand is that million, billion, trillion are not at all like one, two, three. 

In a series of experiments, Landy showed how hard it is by giving people a line similar to the one you saw earlier. The research was inspired by the fact that even the mathematically trained academics in his lab struggled with such enormous numbers—and the bigger they are, the harder they are to grasp. So he wasn’t surprised by the results. 

“Despite their importance in public discourse,” Landy and his colleagues wrote in a 2013 paper, “numbers in the range of 1 million to 1 trillion are notoriously difficult to understand.”