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 road...