Money covering the planet

alexsok

Regular
After looking at this image it got me thinking. If money could be visually represented similarly across the entire planet or maybe even the universe, how high do you think the number would be? :)

demonocracy-derivatives-230_trillion_exposure.jpg
http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/derivatives/bank_exposure.html
 
I figured out these piles may cover 0.015% of emerged land area.

Else I first thought of Uncle Scrooge McDuck's gigantic coffer, dunno if it can contain all those trillions if the coins were indeed gold ones.


51260128.jpg
 
A $100 bill is approximately 100 cm², or 0.01 m².

$10,000 would occupy about 1 m², or 0.000001 km².
$10 billion would occupy 1 km².
$10 trillion would occupy 1,000 km².
$10,000 trillion would occupy 1,000,000 km², or about 1/10 of the US.

Google says the land area of the world is about 149 million km², so you'd need about 1,490,000 trillion dollars to cover the Earth with $100 bills, i.e. 14,900 trillion notes.

Of course, it would be "cheaper" with $1 dollar bills, and much cheaper still with weaker currencies.
 
A $100 bill is approximately 100 cm², or 0.01 m².

$10,000 would occupy about 1 m², or 0.000001 km².
$10 billion would occupy 1 km².
$10 trillion would occupy 1,000 km².
$10,000 trillion would occupy 1,000,000 km², or about 1/10 of the US.

Google says the land area of the world is about 149 million km², so you'd need about 1,490,000 trillion dollars to cover the Earth with $100 bills, i.e. 14,900 trillion notes.

Of course, it would be "cheaper" with $1 dollar bills, and much cheaper still with weaker currencies.
Could you do the same calculation with the observable universe based on the projected diameter of the universe of 92-billion light years which is 8.70368613 × 1026 meters?

I found some articles about that with pictures/
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/combined-wealth-world.html

bills-to-moon-2-1024x658.png


But the only thing I could find about the observable universe is another article from there about Grahams number:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html

I will only include the googoolplex description from there:
As we’ve discussed, filling the universe with sand only gets you a ten billionth of the way to a googol, so what we’d have to do is fill the universe to the brim with sand, get a very tiny pen, and write 10 billion zeros on each grain of sand. If you did this and then looked at a completed grain under a microscope, you’d see it covered with 10 billion microscopic zeros. If you did that on every single grain of sand filling the universe, you’d have successfully written down the number googolplex.
 
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You can't fill the universe with bank notes. Or rather you couldn't even if you had enough matter to do it: after a few solar masses, it would all collapse into a black hole.
 
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You can't fill the universe with bank notes. Or rather you couldn't even if you had enough matter to do it: after a few solar masses, it would all collapse into a black hole.
This is clearly a thought experiment as no one would propose for something like that to happen. What would be the point? It is a valid thought experiment nevertheless since the observable universe does have an estimated diameter and the number of banknotes can be theoretically estimated that would cover its entirety.
 
I took his response to be toungue-in-cheek, just like the thought of having a universe filled with money :)
 
And isn't the universe expanding very, very quickly? You can't just 'fill it up' and go cause there would constantly be more space to fill, right?

Then again with all those bank notes, the gravity would probably start off the collapse of the universe, a new Big Bang and we're back to zero.

Maybe that's what happened before the Big Bang! Oh god. Oh god. I got it. That's it!
 
I took his response to be toungue-in-cheek, just like the thought of having a universe filled with money :)

Indeed.

This is clearly a thought experiment as no one would propose for something like that to happen. What would be the point? It is a valid thought experiment nevertheless since the observable universe does have an estimated diameter and the number of banknotes can be theoretically estimated that would cover its entirety.

Theoretically, yes, you'd just have to suspend the laws of physics.

If I didn't screw up the calculations, and based on the fact that all dollar bills seem to be 0.0043" thick, a trillion dollars would occupy about 1.12×10^-6 km³, and the observable universe is about 3.57×10^71 km³.

So you could cram about 3.17×10^77 dollars' worth of $100 notes into the universe.

That might even be enough to afford a Quad-SLI of GeForce GTX Titan 3.
 
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