Hank Green, “5 Ways to Actually Understand Very Large Numbers”
I appreciate that each of these strategies drives at a different kind of understanding. One all–encompassing comprehension isn’t the goal, but rather more clarity in distinct contexts.
Still, I have to admit that my strategy for understanding big numbers is often to, uh, just give up? Take the idea of the “cosmic calendar”, which condenses all of time into one calendar year: If Ye Big Bang is the dawn of 1 January, then the Earth forms on 14 September, eukaryotes on 15 November, dinosaurs on 24 December, and humans around 10:30 p.m. on 31 December; the Renaissance occurs around 11:59:59 p.m.
The cosmic calendar simile might make the time scale in question more legible, but I don’t think that’s the same as making it more understandable, or making that understanding more useful. When it comes to the age of the universe and the utter brevity of our existence in it, I think the correct response is in fact to wallow, for just a while, in the incomprehensible vastness of the numbers involved.