Headline National Review: Only A Trillion

The Congressional Budget Office added a trillion dollars to its forecast of the total budget deficit for 2004-13. — The Economist, January 24-31

A trillion dollars! Actually, the phrase that came into my mind on reading that was: “Only a trillion?” Not because of any wish that the CBO had been more generous in the upgrade of their forecast, but because Only a Trillion was the title of a book by the late Isaac Asimov, one of those numberless collections of essays on science and math he turned out through the 1960s and 1970s. Asimov explained the title as follows:

After considerable computation one day recently I said to my long-suffering wife: “Do you know how rare astatine-215 is? If you inspected all of North and South America to a depth of ten miles, atom by atom, do you know how many atoms of astatine-215 you would find?”

My wife said, “No. How many?”

To which I replied, “Practically none. Only a trillion.”

(I like to imagine Mrs. Asimov reacting to this information in the style of my own patient spouse, with something like: “That’s nice, dear. Did you put out the garbage?”)