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TRILLION







U.S. BUDGET



JUST HOW LONG IS A TRILLION SECONDS?

Published: September 28, 1986

To the Editor:
It occurred to me, reading Joseph Sawyer's letter on the national debt ceiling (Sept. 14), that I didn't know what $1 trillion is, let alone $2 trillion. Of course, I knew that a trillion is a thousand billion and that a billion is a thousand million. But I didn't really understand what that means. Knowing there are 12 zeros in a trillion didn't help much either.
Why not think of it in terms of seconds, I asked myself? A trillion seconds would have to be years, probably many years ago. I made a wild guess. As it turned out, I wasn't close. I found that 1,000 seconds ago was equal to almost 17 minutes. It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds. Therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709.8 years.
A trillion seconds ago, there was no written history. The pyramids had not yet been built. It would be 10,000 years before the cave paintings in France were begun, and saber-toothed tigers were still prowling the planet.
I was stunned. At first I thought I must have made a mistake, but a banker friend checked my figures and pronounced them accurate.
Was I alone in not knowing how long ago a trillion seconds was? I asked some of my neighbors what they would say if they were told they could have $1 trillion in one-dollar bills, so long as they agreed to initial each bill. Their answers were very similar. ''No!'' they said. When I asked why, they said, almost without exception, ''Because it would take me the rest of my life!''
We must all of us, especially our elected officials, stop thinking of a trillion seconds as merely a long time ago and a trillion dollars as just a lot of money. The next time our senators and representatives consider the Federal deficit and the cost of the arms race, they should allow themselves briefly to think of seconds instead of dollars. They might then picture, if they would, prehistoric man hunched in a smoke-filled cave, gnawing at the bones of a woolly mammoth. DOROTHY C. MORRELL Seattle, Sept. 18, 1986






BUDGET







SCIENCE







TECHNOLOGY







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MEDIA








We weren't prepared: The government's lagging understanding of social media technology leaves tech companies to monitor themselves — which didn't provide much incentive for them to keep close tabs on how their platforms were being used for electoral manipulation. [Axios AM, October 10, 2017]



FOREIGN POLICY







CYBERSECURITY









WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH? - DHS awarded $194,000 to a company that uses the equivalent of radio frequency-hopping to confuse hackers, according to an announcement from the department's science and technology wing late last week. Woodland Park, Colo.-based NexiTech's technology focuses on financial institutions' storage devices and networks. "The NexiTech security architecture broadens active defense technologies within the finance sector, which will be an exciting development for this industry," said Eric Harder, program manager for S&T Cyber Security Division's Next Generation Cyber Infrastructure Apex program. [POLITICO's Morning Cybersecurity, October 10, 2017]



GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE




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Women with vulnerable backgrounds are easy prey for drug syndicates and human trafficking. The law is blind to systemic gender bias stacked against them.

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