What is a trillion?

Simply put, a million million. Well if you're British its a million million million but being somewhat out numbered by the rest of the world and with a nod to pragmatism we'll stick to the international definition.

Long strings of zero's don't really allow most of us to comprehend the true scale of this number (one with 12 zero's after it). Perhaps those who work in Astrophysics or nanotechnology will have a good comprehension but to most of us we need a contextualisation.
Finding a context that conveys the magnitude of this number is tricky. For example the number of Homo-sapiens to have ever existed in a meagre 110 billion, just 11% of a trillion. Obvious analogies such as piles of coins are readily available through Internet searches but are still tricky to conceive. Think Brewster's Millions, that was only $300million, 0.03% of the figure we're talking about and look how hard that was for Monty to get rid of!
As a human analogy, workers building roads for the Roman Empire were expected to achieve a rate of 1.35m per man per day. Taking 753 BC as the date that Romulus founded the city of Rome it would have required just over 73000 workers toiling every day until the present day to build a road 1 trillion meters long. For a more modern metaphor, the number of miles driven by all the cars, trucks and SUV's in the USA each year is a little over 3 trillion.
In the context of computer networks information is transmitted down a fibre-optic cable as ones and zeros using lasers. The fibre optic cable slows down the speed of the laser light somewhat to a mere 205,000,000 meters per second. 1 trillion ones and zeros would be known as 1 Terabit (notated as 1Tb). Sent sequentially down a fibre-optic cable in one second each one and zero would be separated by a gap of only 0.2mm and the queue would extend 5.1 times round the earth.
Ultimately comprehension of such an enormous number is difficult yet these are the sorts of numbers that are becoming common place in the field of computer networks. In the UK data from OFCOM (the UK telecoms regulator) suggests that national Internet usage regularly tops 30Tb/s leaving those in the industry with no choice but to comprehend this enormous number.

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