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Remember it's a lot easier to visualize these numbers if you take the cube or square root. A trillion is 10^12 which is 10^4 cubed or 10^6 squared. That means a
by dataflow 2y ago
Remember it's a lot easier to visualize these numbers if you take the cube or square root. A trillion is 10^12 which is 10^4 cubed or 10^6 squared. That means a cube with 10,000 items along each dimension, or a square with a million items on each dimension.
- psychoslave 2y agoI think you overestimate a bit human average level in cognitive visualization capacities, if 10,000 items is to be considered as easy to hold as a clear image in mind. :’D There’s a reason a myriad that initially really mean 10,000, is also associated with a countless number or multitude.
- HPsquared 2y ago1000 in a line is okay (millimetres on a metre stick, or pixels on a screen) but 10,000 is too much.
- dxdm 2y agoI think you can still get an intuition. 10000 people standing next to each other so that each person has half a meter to themselves will give you a line of 5 kilometers (just over 3 miles). That's a relatable distance - for example, the length of Central Park is 2.5 miles, apparently. It's not perfect, but gets you somewhere. Squaring and cubing makes it less relatable, but it's still a lot better than a completely abstract number IMO. Thinking about this just now made me realize both how long a line of 10000 people can be and how densely you can pack them in a square - or how many people (theoretically) fit into 5x5 kilometer area.
- HPsquared 2y agoOr as a timescale, 10,000 seconds is about 2h46m, the length of Dune 2.
- HPsquared 2y agoAnd a metre stick with millimetre or centimetre divisions works well for the different side lengths. Like a billion is a cube of length 1 metre, made of cubes 1mm wide. You can also roughly scale down by factors of 3 (square root of 10, roughly) by considering a 30cm ruler in place of the metre stick.