What's making news - 1,000,000,000,000,000
A paltry million is the numeral one followed by six zeros. A billion? Nine zeros. A trillion is getting up to 12 zeros. But the mighty quadrillion has 15 of them i.e 1,000,000,000,000,000.
It is mind-boggling.
This number was in the news recently because it is now the national debt of Japan, one quadrillion yen.
Nonetheless, this number is too small than googol - yes, that's the actual spelling - you may as well google it. So, what is a googol - it is number one followed by one hundred zeros.
How much is a quadrillion? The entire human body is said to have just 100 trillion cells and it takes 10 of us to make a quadrillion
The director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has offered a few other ways to think about a quadrillion. “It would take you 31 million years to count to a quadrillion - one number per second, never sleeping,” he said, adding that “a quadrillion yen, stacked in 1,000-yen notes, would ascend 70,000 miles high.”