What's a Trillion ACTUALLY?

Recently this word has entered common usage. Some good definitions of what it actually means.

My favourite?

"A trillion is roughly equivalent to 300 to 400 shitloads, or 500 to 600 assloads (depending on geographic location and weather conditions.)"

Others:

TIme Magazine has a good view on it here.

THE US NATIONAL DEBT INTO PERSPECTIVE

$ 7,937,463,000,000.00

Seven trillion, nine hundred and thirty seven billion, four hundred and sixty three million dollars

A trillion in perspective to other common terms of reference... here.

Or let's look at this from a time perspective. Stopwatch ready? This is based upon 10:00 AM GMT +1 on 10th February 2009

1,000,000 (1 million) seconds equals = 0.031 years

1,000,000,000 (1 billion) seconds equals = 31.6 years

1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) seconds equals = 31,688.8 years

Therefore...

1 million seconds ago it was summer (or winter for my Oz friends).

1 billion seconds ago it was it was May of 1977!

1 trillion seconds ago it was 29,679 BC or thereabouts (give or take a second or two)

Now, where did we put the paddles???

UPDATE: A good visualisation is found here.