Really Big Numbers

It isn't easy to grasp the magnitude of the numbers floating around today. For instance, the bill that intellectually hobbled US president Biden is soon going to sign for "covid relief" is supposed to total $1.9 trillion dollars. How much is that?

Written in numbers it looks like this: $1,900,000,000,000. There's an estimated 7 billion homo sapiens wandering about the planet's surface. Simple arithmetic indicates that if distributed equally among all living earthlings, each would receive $271. If the recipients were all US citizens, each Yankee would get $5,758.

This is new territory. For all of human history, except for the most recent years, the term "million" served to enumerate a round, almost impossible to visualize, number. A "millionaire" was a person with a stupendous amount of wealth. Not anymore. Billionaires now exist. 

Oddly, the application of large numbers hasn't changed in any other field but money and finance. It's still roughly 93 million miles from the earth to the sun, just as it has been for billions of years and likely billions more. A light year, the distance that a beam of light will travel in one earth year, is a little less than 6 trillion miles and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The number of cells in the body of the average human male is estimated to be between 35 and 40 trillion, unlikely to grow or shrink if humans remain in their current configuration.

Big numbers are needed to quantify the changes in the amounts of real goods, however. For instance, the US produces about 12,108,000 barrels of oil per day. Prior to Drake's discovery in 1859 the amount recovered was a little more than zero. 

In the case of fiat money, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank can enpixelate any amount of money since that money is an abstraction, no mints or printing presses needed. The money itself is tied to no concrete substance, like gold, silver or wampum. All that's necessary is for society to accept that the digital money in their accounts represents real value. Who knows what the upper limit on digital US money might be? Or is there even such a limit?