More valuable than I thought

I was checking out the CNN website this morning when I learned that dinosaur poop from the Jurassic period recently sold for $960 at an auction. What an inspiring story! I thought that poop was generally pretty worthless. For example, just the other day I bought a 20 lb bag of steer manure for $1.29 at Lowe's. That means that I could buy 744 bags of steer manure (close to 7 1/2 tons of cow pies) for the same price as the dinosaur poop. That just goes to show how much poop appreciates over time.

That got me thinking about investments. Let's say I sunk $960 into steer manure and then held onto it for another 130 million years. Assuming a relatively conservative inflation rate of just 2% compounded annually, I used the following formula to find the net worth of this poop in the year 130,002,007:

When I tried to use a TI-89 to compute the value, it immediately kicked out the symbol for infinity. Being a math teacher, I knew that couldn't be right. Sure, it might be a big number, but there's no way that it could be infinitely large. So I went into work, booted up Mathematica, a high-powered mathematics application, and reentered the formula. I got the following answer:

Basically, my poop investment would be worth $20,479,554,970,775 followed by an additional 1,118,012 zeros. Talk about leaving a legacy for your posterity. And the beauty of the whole plan is that the crap I collect doesn't necessarily have to be cow manure. Let's say that I decided to stockpile all the dog droppings from the backyard. Or maybe I can save up all the poop from baby diapers in our neighborhood. Whatever. I just need a lot of crap and a place to store it. Then wait 130,000,000 years, and Eureka! (No pun intended.) I'm rolling in the dough.

My new mantra: When life gives you crap, make fossilized crap! And then sell it!