Put things in perspective: Understanding the national debt

Thirty-five trillion seconds is about 1.1 million years. To put it another way, if you started counting at the beginning of the Stone Age, you’d still be counting.

Thirty-five trillion dollars in $100 bills would weigh approximately 770,000 tons. This is roughly the weight of 200,000 cars.

The average distance from Earth to the sun is about 93 million miles. At 35 trillion miles, you could make approximately 376 round trips between Earth and the sun.

An Olympic-sized swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons. Thirty-five trillion gallons would fill approximately 53 million such pools.

NASA’s budget for 2024 is about $27 billion. Thirty-five trillion dollars is more than 1,000 times NASA’s annual budget.

If $35 trillion were stacked in $100 bills, the stack would reach about 2.2 million miles high, which is more than eight times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

As of 2024, the world’s population is around 8 billion people. Thirty-five trillion people would be over 4,375 times the current global population.

The Great Salt Lake, one of the largest saline lakes in the United States, has a maximum volume of around 27 million acre-feet, or about 88 billion gallons. Thirty-five trillion gallons would be enough to fill the Great Salt Lake approximately 397 times.

Assuming a rough estimate that an adult human consumes about 2,000 calories per day, 35 trillion people would require 70 trillion calories per day. To put that in perspective, it is about 400 million times the current global daily food supply.

Assuming it takes one second per dollar bill, it would take over 1.1 million years to count to 35 trillion dollars.

The United States uses about 410 billion gallons of water per day. Thirty-five trillion gallons is enough to meet this daily consumption for about 85 years.

The world uses about 1.1 trillion gallons of water annually for all purposes. Thirty-five trillion gallons would cover the global water use for about 32 years.

If you had $35 trillion and spent $1 million every day, it would take you over 95,000 years to spend it all.

The Empire State Building weighs approximately 365,000 tons, or 730 million pounds. Thirty-five trillion pounds would be about 48 million times the weight of the Empire State Building.

If a typical car weighs about 3,000 pounds, 35 trillion pounds would be equivalent to the weight of about 11.7 billion cars.

Thirty-five trillion gallons is more than 53 times the volume of the Great Lakes combined.

Thirty-five trillion grains of sand would fill about 1,400 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

If you spread 35 trillion grains of sand over an area, assuming each grain covers about 1 square millimeter, it would cover around 35,000 square meters, or roughly 8.6 acres. This is about the size of six football fields.

If you divided $35 trillion equally among the approximately 8 billion people on Earth, each person would get around $4,375.

As of Aug. 19, the U.S. national debt was $35.18 trillion, which is the total amount of money our federal government has borrowed to cover its expenses over time.

Just keeping things in perspective.