I got an email from a somewhat uninformed source about how long it would take at a certain rate to pay off the 2 trillion dollars or so of additional debt incurred lately. To make a long story short, I realized that somewhere along the way the long scale trillion had been used instead of the short scale trillion. You might be familar with the fact that what we call one trillion, 1,000,000,000,000, is called one billion in some countries (though most English speaking countries are coming around to our way of seeing things). It turns out trillion also has an alternate meaning. In the long scale , a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's a million times as much as our trillion, which is by how much the email was off.

This short course in naming conventions for large numbers led to the discovery that many ancient texts actully talk about very large numbers. In Buddhism, there is a number called "héng hé shā" which literally means sands of the Ganges, and is equal to 10⁵². I thought that number sounded a little large too, so I conducted a little exercise. Instead of the Ganges river, I used the Sahara Desert. I assumed that grains of sand are about 1/64 of an inch per side, and that the Sahara Desert is covered with an average of about 25 feet of sand. Of course that's much too small for some areas, and much too much for others, but I'm just trying to get a sense of scale, not precise numbers. In any case, using these numbers, I estimated that the Sahara contains around 1.1 X 10²⁴ grains of sand, which means that the Buddhists are exagerating by a scale of about 10²⁸ at a minimum and actually more since the Ganges is quite a bit smaller than the Sahara. So you can see, using extra big, big numbers with no basis in truth in order to impress people is no new thing.