Travel Time to reach the National debt of 12 trillion

With all the current taxes, the government is looking for ways to tax the American people even more. Our elected officials, entrusted to run the government, have created a 12 trillion dollar deficit since the beginning of the year and it was just passed to increase this by another trillion.. This is a huge number which most people cannot comprehend.  Let use the 12 trillion as the bench mark although it is now up to 14.4 trillion.

Just a thought to consider on how big this number is. Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. A traveler, moving at the speed of light could circum-navigate the equator approximately 7.5 times in one second. Suppose we had a space ship that could travel at the speed of light and we set out to visit our 2^nd nearest star. http://www.northern-stars.com/solar_system_distance_scal.htm In the first 1.28 seconds we would pass the moon. In just over an hour we would pass Saturn. After just over four hours we would pass Neptune and in just over 5 hours we would pass Pluto and be out of our solar system. In one day alone we would travel 16 billion,070 million ,400,000 thousand miles. Near the middle of 62^nd day of travel, the spaceship will just reach the trillion mile mark. Now in one year the spaceship will have traveled 5.87 trillion miles which is called a light year. Our closest star to earth, excluding the sun, is calculated to be 4.2 light years away, or about 24 trillion miles. So to reach the half way mark of 12 trillion miles, about the same number as the current deficit number I am using for this example, we would have to keep traveling for 747 days.( 2 years and 17 days) By then the deficit will have grown by how much?. Pardon the pun, but those are astronomical numbers.

Numbers help understanding distance...

Sometimes refered to as the "blue marble" our home planet "Earth" is spinning in space, and has been for billions of years. Thanks to gravity, we are unaware of our journey through space.  In order to really appreciate the incredible size of the Universe, it is important to get a perspective on the actual size of numbers, which help us better vizualize the scope and vastness of the Universe and earths journey.

1,000,000  One million
1,000,000,000  One Billion or 1000 million
1,000,000,000,000  One Trillion of 1000 Billion
1,000,000,000,000,000  One Quadrillion or 1000 Trillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000  One Quintillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  One Sextillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  One Septillion
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  One Octillion

This should be far enough to get into number sizes to get a good understanding of the distances as we look further at facts about our universe on this Blog.  Be sure and read the other posts.