A football field
is 100 yards, or
300 feet long.
To put things in
the earth at an
altitude of around
A million dollars is a lot of money, but have you ever wondered
how high a stack of one million dollar bills would be?
To answer this question we must first determine the thickness of a
single dollar bill. We can make this measurement with a dial caliper:
With this measuring tool it is easy to determine that a dollar bill is very close
to 0.004 inches thick. A stack of one million of these would be 0.004 times
1,000,000 or 4,000 inches tall. To convert inches to feet, divide by 12.
4000 divided by 12 is slightly over 333 feet. Wow, that's more than the length
of a football field! A football filed is only 100 yards or 300 feet.
A billion is a thousand million. If a stack of a million dollars is 333 feet
high, then a stack one thousand times this would be 333,000 feet. To find how
high this is in miles simply divide by 5280, the number of feet in a mile.
The answer may surprise you. A stack of a billion one dollar bills would reach
over 63 miles high!
It is interesting that our space shuttle flys at an altitude of around
two-hundred miles above the earth. We would have to stack 3.2 billion dollars
to reach this height. Just for fun I looked up NASA's 06 budget. It
was fourteen billion dollars. Why, that's only enough money to make four trips. :-)