At the time of writing this article, the current US national debt stands at $8.595 trillion. This is a number that we often hear but of which the sheer magnitude is difficult to comprehend.

In order to illustrate just how large that number is consider the following…

The size of a dollar bill is 6.6294 cm wide, by 15.5956 cm long, and 0.010922 cm in thickness. It would take approximately 96,721,648 dollar bills to make up one square kilometre.

If we were to cover an area with enough dollar bills to pay off the current US debt it would have an area of 88,863 square kilometres which would cover slightly more than the entire state of South Carolina!

When stacked, the number of dollar bills required to represent the US debt would be 938,746 km high. This is nearly three times the distance to the moon!

Laid end to end the dollar bills would measure 1,340,488,443 km - that nearly reaches Saturn from the Sun!

Unbelievable. Calculate the numbers yourself...