Lightyear dollars

August 30, 2008

Have you ever heard a politician say "300 million, I mean billion dollars ... ", or something like that? I have. All the time. When numbers get so big, they loose meaning, even to members of congress.

I just watched a show about space, and the speaker explained how the distances and dimensions are so huge, they have to use "light-years" as the distance of measurement. I knew what a light year was, but I never bothered to calculate out how many miles it was. Anyway, the speaker went on to explain how light travels 186,000 miles per second, and if you let light travel for a whole year that distance would be a light year, and it works out to 5.87 trillion miles. I was actually shocked by how few miles that was! I guess because reading the news the last couple of years, trillion comes up all the time, and it doesn't seem that big anymore :

Budget deficit (this year) - 1/2 trillion
Budget deficit (last 8 years) - 3.1 trillion
Iraq War Projected Cost : 3 to 6 trillion
National Debt : 9.6 trillion

Maybe we should start publishing these in numbers in something like light-year dollars. It makes sense for measuring the vastness of space, and so it does for stuff like this.

-- Greg