When I was a kid (last century), a billion anything was a huge number. Unfathomably big. It was the biggest number we would use in reference to pretty much anything in real life.
But no longer. We now frequently talk about numbers in the trillions. At the end of 2023, the total US federal debt was just over US$33 Trillion. That’s $33,000,000,000,000. As hard as a billion is for us mere mortals to get our head around, a trillion of anything is beyond anything we can conceptualise.
One million seconds is nearly 11 days, 14 hours. A billion seconds is a little over 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years – nearly three times longer than the oldest human civilisation, and seven times the age of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Needless to say, a trillion is a big number.
But the world is getting bigger, and we need these bigger numbers to help us keep track of things. Like deficits.
In various sciences, big numbers represent very long periods of time. In geology, movements of tectonic plates are measured in tens of millions of years. In astrology, the universe is estimated at between 13 and 26 billion years. In biology, evolution takes place over millions of years. Most people struggle with these concepts, in part because they can’t adequately conceptualise these enormous time periods.
In the IT space, we have used some of these big numbers for a while. A Megabyte is 1 million bytes, but we rarely even think in terms of Megabytes anymore. A Gigabyte is a billion bytes. Most devices have tens or hundreds of Gigabytes (GB) of memory. My iPhone has 512GB of storage. That’s enough space to store over 50,000 songs, which is over 100 days of constant playing.
A Terabyte (TB) is a trillion bytes. The storage devices currently in use – what we used to call hard disk drives – are generally measured in Terabytes. I have a 16TB external backup drive connected to my laptop. Two of those is the storage equivalent of the 2023 US Deficit.
Even today, firms can buy Petabyte storage systems. That’s a thousand Terabytes, or a quadrillion bytes. That’s 1015 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. And firms are working on Exabyte systems (a quintillion bytes).
There was a time we struggled to conceptualise of numbers this big. We didn’t need them in day-to-day life. But now, these massive numbers are becoming more relevant to everyday life. We need to recalibrate. Recalibrate bigger. We need to be able to appreciate the enormity of the numbers we are now dealing with.
Consider the data generated daily by social media platforms, streaming services, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Every interaction, every click, and every piece of content contributes to this data deluge. By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created every day globally. That’s more than the entire digital universe created up until 2002, generated in just a single day.
And it is not just at this abstract, whole-of-world level these numbers will need to be understood. In your business, Terabytes and even Petabytes will need to be stored and analysed. In your business, you will need to make sense of these huge datasets.
This explosion of data and the accompanying increase in the scale of numbers we use isn’t just confined to technology. In finance, the concept of a trillion-dollar company was once unthinkable, but now we have multiple firms, like Apple and Microsoft, crossing that threshold. These numbers reflect not just the growth of these companies but also the expansion of the global economy and the sheer scale at which modern enterprises operate.
With bigger numbers comes bigger responsibility. For all of us. We need to better understand what these numbers mean. As the saying goes, “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Except now, its trillions.
So, while we may still struggle to fully grasp the enormity of a trillion, it’s a number that is increasingly relevant in our world. Whether in technology, finance, or government, trillions are the new billions. And as our world continues to expand, we’ll likely see even bigger numbers become part of our everyday conversations. The real challenge will be ensuring we can adequately conceptualise what these big numbers mean.