Why is it hard for us to conceptualize really big numbers / distances. (1 billion / 1 lightyear)
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Well conceptualizing a billion is so hard due to how similar is sounds to a million. “Millionaires and Billionaires” rolls off the tongue so easily, so we often group them into the same category. However, there is a vast difference, an easier explanation for me was when you realize one billionaire is equivalent one thousand millionaires. For lightyears, I’d say it’s mainly due to the current state of space exploration. We’ve barely scratched the surface of how much we have explored. In our daily lives, the most distance we’d go would be a couple thousand miles for a plane trip, so it’s easier to associate a plane trip with being a thousand miles. Currently, no one has experienced a “light year” so we really cannot associate with anything, or have it relative to the amount of time it would take to achieve that distance
There’s not usually a frame of reference for some things at all.
You’ve seen 100 of something, you’ve seen a 1000 of something, you may even have a concept for something like 100,000 people at a large football game.
But beyond a certain point the numbers become theoretical and just start to blur as ‘big’
It also depends on the units of something, It’s much easier to conceive of $1 billion because there’s things that could cost that and our day to day life has experiences closer to that number. You might make $100,000 a year, or have bought a $600,000 home or at work the budget for your department might be $63 million a year.
But trying to fully visualize a different unit, say 1 billion years, is very difficult, because we only really live up to about 100 years, and that happens so gradually, we never deal with or plan for more than a few years at a time.
Distance is similar, you can conceive that 1000km might be a 10 hour drive but to go to a light year, 9,400,000,000,000km… becomes inconceivable and loses any understandable metric.
Also for written number we can lose the concept of orders of magnitude.
That 85,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 is 0.01% of 856,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
A couple extra digits completely change the scope and scale of the number.
We’d never dismiss the difference between 1 person and 10,000 people, but we do kind of mentally not appreciate that same difference in huge numbers.
How is it hard to conceptualize either of those numbers. We conceptualize them hence why they are a real thing. 1 billions is 1 billion people. 1/7(ish) of the global population. ! light year is conceptualized in astronomy/astrophysics, hence why we know of DSO that are MILLIONS sometimes BILLIONS of light years away, let alone a single light year. Thats only 6,000,000,000,000 miles……thats nothing in space distances. Thats like a baby step…
At the end of the day, our intuition and our sense of perspective is based on our personal experiences. We have never personally travelled a whole light year or physically seen Jupeter up close. When was the last time you counted all the way to a billion? These are why it’s hard for us to truely grasp huge sizes other than “they’re really really big”.
1) Experience. The brain works by putting link between existing notions. When you are trying to conceptualise something, what you are really trying to do is trying to understand how this thing relate to the other things you already conceptualised. You have problem conceptualising it because it is different from your everyday life, so you have nothing you are used to that you can compare it to.
2) How the brain deal with scale. The brain “naturally” knows how to count up to 3. After that, that’s more complex. (Which is why Roman numerals stop stacking similar symbols after 3, so at you get VII and not IIIIIII). After that, the brain doesn’t conceptualise well numbers, but it conceptualise approximations of numbers (“this is roughly a dozen”), and the bigger you go, the sketchier those approximation become (and the more they start differing from individuals to individuals) until it the only information remaining is “that’s a very big number, bigger than other big numbers I never really conceptualised, but smaller than bigger numbers that I also never really conceptualised”.
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