Institute of General Semantics

Hello to All,

I came across this quotation the other day, and I can't seem to get it out of my mind (probably because I wonder how any person could possiibly grasp the concept, or 'reality', of the trillion dollars required for the US bank bailout.)

How could we evaluate the following quotation according to general semantics guidelines, or the ideas of Ed MacNeal? www.mathsemantics.com/

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
-Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

Thanks,
Jackie

I would bring this down to lower level abstractions. Let's say we breathe at a rate of 30 breaths per minute. There are about 525,600 minutes in a year or about 17520 breaths per year. A trillion equals (depending on which system English/American) 1000, 000, 000, 000. Divided by 17520 we get say 57, 077,625 years. If we owed a trillion dollars and we paid back at a rate of 1000 dollars per breath it would take us about 57,077 over 57 thousand years to be out of debt. Of course we would be out of breath long, long before this.

Put another way. If the population of earth is 6,000,000,000, 6 billion humans. And earth people owed Martians 1,000, 000, 000, 000 a trillion dollars, humans--men , women, children, babies, would owe about 140 dollars each.

The arithmetic could be wrong. But this is just a suggestion--one way to get a feel of the numbers involved. I invite you to post your own.