Why is it hard for us to conceptualize really big numbers / distances. (1 billion / 1 lightyear)
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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.
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