I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR lately. In particular the Planet Money Podcast. If you’re unfamiliar with it and want to know more about why our economy is in the toilet then I highly recommend it. That and a couple episodes of This American Life that deal with these issues. In one particular podcast they ask the question What exactly is a Trillion? In the story they figure out how long it would take to count to a trillion if you counted one dollar bills at one a second.

According to the Planet Money Podcast, counting to a million would about 11.7 days, a billion would take about 33 years and a trillion would take more than 32,000 years.

I will turn 34 years old in September. I’m over a billion seconds old. After a few calculations, I figured a billion seconds is closer to 31.7 years. I figure that I turned 1,000,000,000 seconds old on May 20th, 2007 at around 10am. Where was I when I turned 1,000,000,000 seconds old?

Less than a month earlier, Arielle and I were married in North Carolina. I was working at the Clovis News Journal in Clovis, New Mexico. May 20th, 2007 was a Sunday, so I had the day off and I was helping out Arielle with a remote she was doing for her radio station. This photo was taken at about 12:48am, less than three hours from when I turned 1,000,000,000 seconds old. That’s well within a 0.1% margin of error. Where were you when you turned 1,000,0000,000 seconds old?