2021.06.28
People don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million. 1 million seconds is about 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years.And of course from there, a trillion seconds is 300+ centuries, or 30 millennia - and its only been 20 centuries or 2 millennia since Rome and Jesus and all that, and maybe 9 or 10 since the earliest cities.
We just have no sense of scale. We've got almost 8 billion people around, and the US budget gets into like 6 trillion. Or to quote Feynman:
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.