Monday, March 9, 2009

Astronomical Debt.

Okay, everybody is going on about the amount of debt the US Congress and Executive branch are racking up. So I decided to crunch some numbers.

The length of a US dollar bill is 6.14"
The current stimulus package is somewhere between 787 and 825 Billion dollars.
The Apollo missions averages about 2000 mph.
The fastest man made object is the Helios 2 solar observation satellite at approximately 150,000 mph.
The speed of light is approximately 3.0x10^8 m/s or 186,000 miles/sec.
One inch is approximately 2.54 centimeters.
5280 feet per statute mile.

Are you ready?

800 billion 1 dollar bills laid end to end measures 4,912,000,000,000 inches or 409,333,333,333.33 feet or 77,525,252.53 miles.

Still just big numbers.

The average jet would take about 20 years to fly from one end to another.

The Apollo mission would have taken around 4.4 years to do the distance.

The fastest man made object ever would take about 21 and a half days to travel from end to end.

Light itself would take about 6.9 minutes to travel from one side to the other.


The bills would stretch from the Earth out past the orbit of Mars.

So astronomical. Yeah, pretty much.

3 comments:

Old NFO said...

In other words... %^&*( BIG debt... sigh...

Tom said...

Yeah, but how long would it take to drive a Prius across?

Did you base the jet time calculation on one of your Lears or on Nancy Pelosi's 737? :-)

aepilot_jim said...

Sorry, I used 440 mph for the jet speed. Some would go slower, some faster. I forgot to reference that.