Hacker News Reader

As awkward as "thousand trillion" is, trillion has the advantage that it shows up in the news on a regular basis. I can much better be impressed by cutting a hair by a nation's debt than I can by cutting the same hair into a quadrillion pieces.

I'd say that people who read about LIGO and quantum limit, also understand quadrillion.

Some countries have national debt in the quadrillions, e.g. Japan and Indonesia.

Nope, use scientific notation if numbers become so unwieldy.

Depends on the audience. Laypeople generally know numbers up to a trillion, hence the choice of language. I only happen to know what a quadrillion is because I've played Cookie Clicker. I have trouble with scientific notation, because I'm not a scientist or mathematician and have no interest in it.

TL;DR, know your audience and cater to them if you want people to be interested.

The problem is that "billion" and "trillion" mean different things to different people[0]. In my opinion they should be regarded as unreliable words and never used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

2^54