Our National Debt: not quite a crab, yet

I just really love the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD, for short) — a free online service published by NASA featuring a new daily photo by an astronomer, along with an explanation from the photographer. Super cool. I look at it every day and sometimes repost the images here because they’re a great reminder of how incredibly huge our universe is, and how incredibly small our world is. And the more you look at these photos of the universe, the more the shapes and forms look like regular things you’d see on earth. The Crab Nebula, shown here, kind-of looks like a dry sponge you’d find in the ocean. This thing is 10 light years across — that equals 58,786,253,731,836.07 miles.   That’s nearly 59 trillion miles across.  Now, our national debt is currently just over 11 trillion dollars. So, next time someone tells you that there’s nothing larger than our national debt, you can tell them hey now, the Crab Nebula is 5 times larger than the national debt. Sounds like our corporate VISA has some catching-up to do.