The North Koreans have hatched an insidious plot to bring down the United States once and for all. In late 2011, North Korea presents the United States government with a Christmas gift in the form of a state of the art robot that scans and counts money. Accepting the perceived gesture of peace, the US Treasury Department puts the robot deep in the secret vaults that contain all the money possessed by the US government. Alone now, the robot opens a secret panel on itself, revealing a compact paper shredder. Starting on the first day of the new year in 2012, the robotic arm on the counter begins to pick up money and shred it. It starts near a mountain of $100 bills, but finds it can only shred 5 bills at a time. Still, the quick robot can pick up 5 bills and shred them fast enough so that it manages to destroy $100 for every second it is working.
The robot is programmed with the common behavior of an American worker, so it will work for 5 days a week, and take holidays off. It takes all its breaks, so ends up spending 7 hours a day actually shredding. In the course of a year, it works for 260 days.
Four years later on New Year’s Eve in 2016, someone alerts authorities to the problem of the shredder. Soon after, two armed treasury officers rush into the vaults and destroy the device with bursts from their MP5K submachine guns.
After an inventory is taken to survey the damage, it’s revealed that the robot managed to destroy $973,812,000, falling short of destroying its first billion. If anything can be learned from this story, besides that perhaps Kim Jong-il would have done more damage sending over a few more US congressmen instead of a money shredding robot, it’s that a billion is more than many people realize. Of course, we know that a billion is a one followed by nine zeroes – most of us even know that a billion is a thousand millions. As widely known as the billion is, can it still be a reasonable question to ask if our imagination truly does a billion justice?
We hear the word billion all time, from the latest scandals of government wasteful spending, to the awesome fortunes accumulated by a handful of businessmen. If everyone had a proper mental grasp of the number, would people dismiss the stories so quickly? Would there be greater outrage concerning government waste, or corporations avoiding taxes? Perhaps at least there would be greater awe when folks read about the net worth of Facebook, which has been recently estimated at 50 billion.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is known to be the world’s first billionaire novelist. Her fortune comes largely from the hugely successful films, but it can be argued that the novels are the source of this money, and her other earnings as well. With her fortune coming to about one billion, and the word count of her seven novels being a little over 1 million, she has earned approximately $1,000 per word.
Susan is an unemployed single mother with 3 kids. She is completely out of money and is afraid of being evicted from her apartment. The kids are hungry, and none of them know where the next meal is coming from. At Susan’s most desperate moment, a knock comes at the door. When she answers she meets a young English schoolboy wearing glasses who has come to help her out. The boy gives Susan a magic stopwatch and tells her if she needs a little extra money to click the button and let it run.
After saying goodbye to the odd boy and closing the door, she immediately punches the button and begins earning a cent for every second the watch is left to run. In an hour, she’s already accumulated $36. Across the street is an expensive pizza place that she has never been able to afford. She gets the kids, and for the $36 they all eat and drink until they almost burst. While eating the pizza, Susan already realizes that her money problems are all over. No matter whether the problem is rent, bills, groceries, or her kids going to college; there’s nothing her new stopwatch can’t handle with some time.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has a magic stopwatch as well, but this one has been earning approximately 80 cents for every second of United States history – all the seconds from the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, to September 21rst 2011, when Bill Gates total worth was estimated at 59 billion dollars. The age of the United States of America is only about 7.4 billion seconds. This isn’t so hard to believe when you consider that an entire year is just over 31 ½ million seconds if you’re not counting on a leap year. You simply divide 7.4 billion by a hundred to make pennies into dollars, and divide Bill’s 59 billion dollar fortune by the $740 million you came up with. Bill’s magic stopwatch is quite astounding.
With so much consideration being drawn to the billion here, another issue could come to one’s mind. Isn’t the news filled with stories of the United States national debt? What was that number being thrown about …. a trillion?