A Thought Exercise in scale

Here's a way I came up with for appreciating the scale of powers of ten (no pun intended) cubed:

• One Domino Dot sugar cube is about 6/10 inch on an edge, or about 1/5 cubic inch.
• Ten (10 to the 1st power) Domino Dot sugar cubes form a line about six inches long.
• One Hundred (10 to the 2nd power) Domino Dot sugar cubes form a square about six inches on an edge.
• One Thousand (10 to the 3rd power) Domino Dot sugar cubes form a cube about six inches on an edge, weighing about eight pounds.
• Eight-thousand (8*10 to the 3rd power) Domino Dot sugar cubes equal about one cubic foot, weighing about sixty-four pounds.
• One million (10 to the 6th power) Domino Dot sugar cubes form a cube about 5 feet on an edge weighing about four tons.
• One billion (10 to the 9th power) Domino Dot sugar cubes form a cube about 50 feet on an edge weighing about four thousand tons.
• One trillion (10 to the 12th power) Domino Dot sugar cubes form a cube about 500 feet on an edge, weighing almost four million tons and containing 15,000,000,000,000 calories.

I really like the mental image of an earth-crushing block of a trillion sugar cubes almost the height of the Washington Monument. Anybody who wants to check my math, feel free. Leave a comment if I'm seriously off. (Mathwise, that is. )