The national debt is $40 trillion. What does that mean mathematically?
An investigation into the incomprehensibly, unfathomably large amount of money the U.S. owes
The U.S. national debt reached $40 trillion for the first time in history on Wednesday. This astronomical figure can be difficult for most people to grasp, but there are several ways to put it into perspective. To visualize $40 trillion, imagine laying out a dollar bill end to end - it would stretch from Earth to the sun and back 20 times. If you spread the money out evenly among the approximately 343 million people living in the U.S., each individual would owe around $116,618.
To fully spend $40 trillion by spending one dollar per second, it would take a person 1.27 million years. In comparison, the number of cells in the human body is about 35 trillion, the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri is roughly 25 trillion miles, and there are approximately 3 trillion trees on Earth. Even Elon Musk's net worth of $1 trillion is significantly less than the current national debt, which is over 40 times greater.
The national debt has been steadily increasing over the years, hitting a record of $39 trillion in March and reaching $40 trillion by the end of the year. It can be challenging for the human brain to comprehend such large numbers - the difference between $38 trillion, $39 trillion, and $40 trillion is hard to visualize, much like the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion.
Each of these increments has three additional zeros, but the jump from a billion to a trillion is vastly larger than the jump from a million to a billion. By the end of the year, the national debt could potentially exceed $41 trillion.
Written by urgent.news from Scientific American's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
