Dennis,
I sorta know what you mean - but I think it's more a case of "we (as a society)" not being even remotely capable of getting our minds around just how big the numbers are.
There was a story in The New Yorker magazine a while back that offered this example specifically to help show just how much is being talked about when using "million" and "billion":
"(Try the following thought experiment, . . . Without doing the
calculation, guess how long a million seconds is. Now try to guess
the same for a billion seconds. Ready? A million seconds is less than
twelve days; a billion is almost thirty-two years.)"
Neil M.
Neil, et al.,
And of course now we are dealing with "a trillion" in the news. A trillion seconds is around thirty thousand years, or roughly on the order of the timeline of human civilization, depending on who you ask.
Put another way....
$1 trillion in one-dollar bills would cover an area of about 3,857 square miles
$1 trillion in one-dollar bills (if packed perfectly) would fill a volume of about 40 million cubic feet, filling the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome two-thirds full.
$1 trillion in one-dollar bills weighs 1.1 million tons, and, if you stacked a trillion $1 bills on top of each other, you'd form a stack that reached a quarter of the way to the moon -- the stack would be nearly 70,000 miles high.
Things to ponder when the President comes on the tube...
Dave