Developing an Intuitive Sense of Scale(magworld.pw) |
Developing an Intuitive Sense of Scale(magworld.pw) |
https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
https://neal.fun/size-of-life/
1 billion is a very large number, and thinking of it as 10^9 make it seem smaller.
1 trillion is "just" 3 orders of magnitude above 1 billion, and "only" 9 orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms in a mole.
I don't know the answer to making the mind understand scale. I don't think things like "it 's about 2000 football pitches" help either. I don't think "a billion is the number of cubic milimeter in a cubic meter" work either. I don't think the logarithm based "zoom visualization" work either. I just think the brain just cannot picture what those numbers mean. We're not wired to understand those things very well, just as we aren't wired to work with 4+ dimensions
Maybe give it a few weeks or months and see if it gets easier for you too.
Focusing on the magnitude instead of the value of a number, changes the perspective when we're talking or thinking in these scales.
From the site:
> The universe is very large, but it is not infinite. All quantities in the universe (distance, time, energy, mass, etc) exist within 50 to 100 orders of magnitude.
> The human species interacts with only 25 of these magnitudes.
We actually don't know this, it's still an open question.