Developing an Intuitive Sense of Scale

  This scale sometimes goes to 11, for example the size of the solar system is ↑11 meters, but even the size of the entire universe is only ↑27 meters. Which should indicate both how “universal” this scale is, and also how big the universe is!

"Got it, so the universe is 3x bigger than the solar system."

"No no, remember these are base 10 logarithms."

"Ah... so it's 16x!"

"No, 10^16x."

"Ah... so it's totally incomprehensible."

Reminds me of the work of Neal Agarwal, e.g.:

https://neal.fun/size-of-space/

https://neal.fun/size-of-life/

https://neal.fun/space-elevator/

https://neal.fun/deep-sea/

While it is easier to think of large numbers in terms of logarithms, cause it makes unfathomly large numbers much more palatable, I disagree that it makes scales more intuitive.

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

Very interesting.

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.