He’s hardly the first Republican who’s cajoled the proles into voting for their own swift deaths.
Nah, there are roughly 100 billion galaxies.
But that’s literally the only scale where you use trillions other than finance (or maybe counting the number of cells in your body or some other bit of trivia). And you’re literally talking about all of existence and a scale that the human mind can’t even remotely comprehend.
The only thing in nature that really comes close is the number of insects on Earth with is even beyond that scale to where you can’t imagine it since it’s in like quintillions or something crazy.
Ah, apparently now we think there are even more galaxies… like 2 trillion.
So I was off by a few orders of magnitude.
I’m sure that I forgot to count a few trillion black holes, which cancel those stars out. Whatever. Relax.
FAKE NEWS
It’s helpful to reduce things to scale and with measurements we can understand (and which can be really mind blowing) - here’s an example for astronomical distance (star size is another good one.)
http://oneminuteastronomer.com/5001/size-of-milky-way/
The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is some 25 trillion miles away. The Orion Nebula lies about 8,000 trillion miles away. And we are some 162,000 trillion miles from the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. These are mind-numbing distances, completely foreign to the everyday experience of even the most hardened stargazers, and they make it hard to grasp the size of our immense Milky Way galaxy.
But there’s a happy numerical coincidence that makes it much easier to contemplate such distances.
Here’s how it works…
A light year, the distance light travels in one year, works out to be about 5.88 trillion miles. An astronomical unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is about 93 million miles, a much smaller distance. A quick calculation shows there’s about 63,200 astronomical units (AU) in a light year.
So far so good.
Now it turns out, completely by chance, there’s also about 63,200 inches in a mile (I’ll let you do the math). So an inch to a mile is the same as an AU to a light year.
Using this compressed scale, where one inch is the Earth-Sun distance, you can get a better feel for the stupendous size of our galaxy…
If the Sun was a grain of sand, and the Earth a microscopic speck one inch away, then Jupiter would lie 5.2 inches away and Pluto an average of 40 inches away. Next stop… the nearest star, about 4.3 miles away, with mostly empty space between it and the Sun. The star Vega would be 26 miles away, the Orion Nebula 1340 miles away, and the globular cluster M15 some 25,000 miles distant (about three times the diameter of the Earth).
And even on this massively compressed scale, the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy itself would be about 100,000 miles.
This little trick of scale helps you wrap your mind around relative distances and appreciate the immense scale of a big galaxy like our Milky Way, where even a light year doesn’t count for much…
It’s certainly not on the ordinary day-to-day scale that we intuitively handle (to greater or lesser degrees of accuracy),but it’s not completely unfathomable. A trillion is, for instance, roughly the number of seconds since the most recent common ancestor of all living humans lived.
Yeah, but that means nothing. Same thing with the astronomical distances… we can think of them in purely abstract senses, but they have no concrete meaning.
Small numbers have a concrete, tangible qualia that means something in your brain. It can be visualized. A trillion does not. It’s a purely abstract concept.
I have no idea why I started talking about this.
Because it’s a fascinating phenomenon.
Here’s a 1986 NYT letter to the editor along these lines:
They hate it in North Carolina too.
Informative as fuck.
Like
There are about 37 trillion cells in your body.
It only takes one misbehaving cell to cause cancer.
There’s your meaning.
Wow, based on your last few posts I am going to have to ignore you any time you mention math of any kind. :)
Hey man, it’s not trivia to us biologists who work with big data. Let’s say I have a million cells I’ve measured expression on, and there are 30,000 genes in the human genome that I care about. That’s 3e+10 already. Now, how many sequencing reads do I need to measure that? It’s usually an additional few orders of magnitude.
Now if you said “Yeah, but what about like…Peta? Nobody uses that!” except we have petabytes of data that we work with on a daily basis.
On a different note, you can also look at probabilities. The change that something happens by chance can be small…like 1e-68 small. That’s far smaller than a 1/trillion. Maybe trillions aren’t something everyone works with, but I’d bet it’s pretty common across any number of scientific fields outside astronomy.
To be fair to Ben, other people’s poverty is a state of mind.
As long as you’re not experiencing it yourself, it’s pretty easy to pretend it doesn’t really exist.
Not sure which thread to put this in, but apparently Greg Gianforte, Republican nominee in MT, just body slammed reporter Ben Jacobs and broke his glasses, supposedly audio (and maybe video) to come.
It’s here:
He was a liberal reporter, don’t you see? Not only does that make him a bad guy ipso facto, but it’s legal to shoot libs in Montana, so Gianforte was just being restrained.
These are not the doors of a trillionaire?