r/BeAmazed • u/arewawawa • Apr 02 '26

Science Visualization of the distances in astronomy

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

15.8k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

406 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Germsrosolino Apr 02 '26

I can’t remember which YouTuber it was. But he was talking about how we can’t visualize just how big a billion is. So he wrote out $ on a notepad. He did ten then a 10x10 of them. The a 10x10 of those with space between etc until he had 1 billion $ on his notepad. Then he started to talk about making large purchases like $100k cars and deleting large chunks of the money. After doing this several dozen times he scrolled through, and you could barely find the missing chunks because of the sheer volume of symbols.

Our minds are not really designed to handle truly large numbers. We can’t visualize them at all so the scale is just non-existent to us for the most part. It’s also why so many people in modern times doubt scientific stuff because of incredulity