Not yet a googolplex

"Billions and billions of years......."

Quote, appropriately attributed to Carl Sagan, famed college professor who studied.......something about space and time. What is a billion?

I graduated from college in 1985 with a two year degree in Electrical Engineering Technology. In 1985 that meant the engineers were the guys in the suits and ties, in their offices, coming up with all kinds of nifty new computer ideas, and I was the guy in the lab struggling with their mistakes. Pay was pretty good, and I was pretty good at my job. My professors didn't just drill us in formulas, they taught us to think, to probe, if you don't know the answer to a problem, how to scientifically work your way through it. I owe those teachers an awful lot. Without them, I'd probably be working in either a grocery or a department store.

Back in those days, we had hands-on classes as well as theory. We took physics and calculus. We learned units of measurements for things so small that you can't even work with the numbers using standard math. And we worked with numbers that were so large you couldn't enter them into a calculator. A capacitor is an electrical component that can range in size from a beer can (about 3 farads - unit of measurement) to ones so small they were measured in trillionths of a single farad (pico-farad). We did it using (depending upon who was speaking) scientific notation or engineering notation. Allow me to learn you non-techies something here.

0 = 0

1,000 = 1 x 10**3 : One thousand (The double "**" denote the power is raised, in this case 10 raised to the power of 3, or 1,000. Blame it on keyboards) : one Kilo.

1,000,000 = 1 x 10**6 : One million : one mega

1,000,000,000 = 1 x 10**9 : One billion : one giga

1,000,000,000,000 = 1 x 10**12 : One trillion, one tera.

Now I know that's just a bunch of zeros, and might not mean much, but I'm working on it. Being scientific/engineering notation, we change the "term" (kilo, mega, giga, tera) every 3 zeros.

Okay, here's where I pull this all together, and I know you're wondering how. How long is one trillion seconds? Go ahead, take your time, come up with a guess. I'll give you a few of those seconds. But I won't give you a trillion seconds to think about it. Because if I did, you'd have 31,000 years to think about it. That's give or take a few centuries. Think about it for a minute (that's 60 seconds, sorry, couldn't resist). If you had a trillion single dollars, and counted one dollar, every second, it would take you 31,000 (31K) years to accomplish this feat.

Know how big the federal budget? $2.6 trillion dollars. That's $2,600,000,000,000 (give or take a few $1,000,000,000). That would take you somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,600 years to count, at the rate of one dollar per second (80.6K). A million is one thousand thousand. A billion is one thousand million, and a trillion is one thousand billion.

The sheer size of the federal budget is practically beyond the scope of a single individual to comprehend. What I've tried to do is give you some idea on just how astronomical these figures are.

Back in 1985, I worked on single board computers that had 4K of memory, actually 4,096 bits of memory, but that has to do with the binary number system used in digital computers as opposed to the one most humans use, the decimal system, which goes from 0 to 9 before it starts over. Ever wonder why we humans use the decimal (base 10) system? How many fingers do most humans have? Today I'm typing on a computer with over 1,000,000 bits of memory space. Those computers didn't have a hard drive, they weren't invented yet. They had no floppy disks, those were too new and expensive.

My computer has an 80G (80,000,000,000) hard drive today. The first hard drive I ever had was only 35K (35,000) of space. I never filled up even 25% of it. The reason I'm explaining this is because the arc of the growth of computer storage has something in common with the growth of governmental spending. Every couple of years or so, all the numbers double.

In 1989 I was working as a technician on a special purpose super computer, 256 parallel processors. The engineers were working on a new version with 65K parallel processors (65,536, again, the odd numbers because of dealing with the binary number system, which has only two values, 0 and 1. That's right, a computer is nothing more than billions and billions of switches, off and on, 0 and 1, true and false. Us tech savvy people just round off.) I remember the budget for that project was $65,000,000 ($65M). And the number stuck in my head because that was the approximate budget for the County I live in. The County budget this year is around $215M ($215,000,000). In about 15 years, County spending has ballooned. You do the math. The same has happened at the federal level.

So why all these numbers? Why all the math (and noticed I charged you $0 for that lesson)? Because, in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, politicians on the left are calling for a tax increase to rebuild. The federal government already takes, under threat of force, $2,600,000,000,000 of our money. They call it revenue, and that's bull - it's our money. In all that money, the pile that would take over 80,000 years to count, at one dollar per second, they can't find enough money for the clean-up. No, they need more. How much more? $3,000,000,000,000? $4,000,000,000,000? $7,000,000,000,000? Now we're approaching the level of the National Debt. That's the amount they spent, but couldn't bring themselves to raise taxes, so they just borrowed it. They want more, because they know how best to spend it. (And its for the children, you understand.) You and me, we're just hairless monkeys, we don't know shit. Ah, but upon entering the hallowed halls of Congress, a special wisdom and intelligence is bestowed upon these dedicated and loyal public servants. The congressional delegation from Louisiana has decided the rest of us need to give them $250,000,000,000 ($250G) in order to rebuild a city, on the coast, below sea level. That should do it, they figure.

Here's the deal. They don't need any more tax money. They have more than they can figure out what to do with now. A couple of years ago Hillary Clinton decided that we should spend $40M in order to set up a 411 system, for public relief money. Move to a new town, and you don't even need to open a phone book to find where to get social services. Nope, just pick up the phone and press 411, and you've got people waiting to throw "government revenue" at you. Now don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a public safety net, I do have a problem with a public safety hammock (hat tip Bill Whittle).

At all levels of government, people are throwing money, our money, at all kinds of projects. Its so easy to be generous when its some one else's money. $10M for a museum here, $120G for agricultural subsidies there, a few billion over there for peanut farming studies. They have enough money. They just need to learn how to spend it effectively. But I have no doubt that will never happen. Rather than waiting for politicians to come to their fiscal senses, my time would be better spent counting to a trillion.

[Editor's note: What a depressing ending. I frantically searched for some good news, some sign that things could get better. Instead I found this.]