Last night I found myself waiting at the entrance to the Chrysler building for my wife when I realized that the yawning outdoor vestibule is an incredible perch from where you can literally hear New York think.
Because it was 6 PM and the Chrysler Building is situated in just outside the "okay-I'm-gonna-get-on-the-train-hangup" zone, I was able to get a front row seat to the New York Unconscious Show. I can't explain it; the experience is something you've got to have for yourself but there was one pearl that surfaced that I would like to share. -- A young lady on her mobile asked her would-be oracle "So... what comes after a-trillion?"
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In another era, not so long ago, this kind of question would fit squarely in the self-deprecating indictment of education in America called "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?". But this was an honest question from someone who, for all intents and purposes, seemed like your slightly better than average New York work-a-day on Lex. And yet her tone lacked the jovial ribbing of Jeff Foxworthy (the self proclaimed blue collar comedian host of "Are you smarter..."). Instead her voice telegraphed a kind of foreboding emptiness.
Granted, this 20-something was not wearing a sandwich board and hearkening the end of days, but it sure seemed plausible that a totally new benchmark has been set for humanity's sense of number and this fellow New Yorker had put her finger right on it.
In 2002 Golan Levin brought a fascination with numbers large and small to our eyeballs in his beautiful piece titled The Secret Lives of Numbers and in 1998 Darren Aranofsky brought to our collective 5th grade intellect, the ancient Hebrew mysticism on numeracy in the incredible, and insane - Pi.
But in this case the simplicity of the statement spoke volumes more about our current predicament than all of the analysis political, financial or otherwise could ever do. In no more than a few milliseconds this person imparted on me the collective psychopathology that a new order of magnitude brings to bear on 6 billion (or so) fleshy calculators. That psychopathology will play out as people start to try and fit an additional 3 zeros into their consciousness - if not their livelihoods.
Of course - we've known about the trillion for some time but did anyone think that significance would come so quickly? The 'trill' landed in much the same way that an meteor in Texas managed to last week; with a bright flash and then silence. I actually think that a plausible (if facetious) argument could be made that the marathoners in the video were 'fleeing' the asteroid. But the meteor and the trillion dollar mark both came and went without too much commotion. And assuming that there aren't too many more (of either!) its probably for the better.
So what comes after 'a-trillion'? I can offer only what I found on the internet... after one trillion comes one quadrillion, followed by - you got it - a quintillion. You can find the rest here at wikipedia. So there you have it - if you happen to know someone who wants to know what comes after 'a-trillion' you can reply 'one trillion and one' ... or point them to the next big number on our horizon the quadrillion. I, for one, hope we take our time getting to this one. The express train has left me feeling a bit piqued.
A note about using wikipedia here. I tried to find an "edu" example hoping that it would help with validation but, in fact, wikipedia has the most elegant and comprehensive explanation on the topic; something else we are going to have to get used to.
