An easy way to bridge such distances is to construct a lot of intermediate steps. Take the Milky Way, containing 100 to 400 billion stars (let's take 250 billion). The problem of grasping 250 billion stars going off from just our sun is not too dissimilar from imagining someone with 250 billion dollars, going off from just 1. Lots of intermediate steps: So and so many dollars for a current generation smart phone, so and so many smart phones for, say, a villa, so and so many villas to buy, say, Microsoft. Of course different examples work differently well, but you get the picture, I suppose.
Incidentally, the number of US citizens is higher than the number of stars in the Milky Way in thousands, so if you find yourself a good way of visualizing the former, you can transfer that understanding to the latter, then just unpack the "thousand".
Nothing interesting, not even the size of our Hubble volume, is more than a couple dozen orders of magnitude away, which makes it -- in my opinion -- quite accessible even to our widdle bwains.
Nothing interesting, not even the size of our Hubble volume, is more than a couple dozen orders of magnitude away, which makes it -- in my opinion -- quite accessible even to our widdle bwains.
A couple dozen orders of magnitude of nearly anything will tend to stretch beyond human borders of intuitive comprehension in either direction.
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: