Grasping Billions & Trillions

Our Government has been spending money like mad lately with all of the bailouts. It is no longer uncommon to hear of a few Billion spent here or there on some specific bailout or other, or even a few hundred Billion, or even Trillions of dollars in aggregate. These numbers are truly mind numbing, and can be difficult to wrap your mind around. Politicians probably hope we don't know how big these numbers truly are. To put these numbers into something easier to grasp, here are some examples:

• There are more than 31 Million seconds in a single year (31,557,600 seconds)
• 1 Million Seconds ago was about 11.6 days ago.
• 1 Billion Seconds ago it was 1977 (31.7 years ago)
• 1 Trillion Seconds ago it was 29,679 years BC (31,688.1 years ago).
• 8 Trillion Seconds ago it was 251,495 BC (253,504.7 years ago)