Numbers, especially the very large and very small, can be deceiving. It's almost impossible for our brains to compute the immense scale in the fields of astronomy or microbiology. Nevertheless, understanding and being able to visualize the incredibly large scale of our universe is valuable.

Let's take a look at time and distance, and translate smaller units of time into understandibly larger units:

1 second equals 1 second

1 million seconds equals 12 days

1 billion seconds equals 30 years

1 trillion seconds equals 30,000 years!

1 millimeter equals 1 mm

1 million mm equals 1 km

1 billion mm equals 1000 km

1 trillion mm equals 1,000,000 km! (this is like going around the world 25 times)

Here's what $10k, $1 million, and $1 billion looks like:









And here's $1 Trillion:









Understanding these large scales can help us visualize numbers that we might read or hear about.





For example, when you hear that something is "99.999% reliable", it means there is an error rate of 10 out of a million. Using our references from above, that's like being offline for only 10 seconds out of 12 days. Or, looking at it from the perspective of "distance", you can have a tolerance of 10mm (about the width of your pinky finger) for every kilometer.





The phrase “One part per million” is often used by chemists to measure concentrations of substances. One ppm is like having a presence of 1 second in 12 days. And a part per trillion? Only 1 second every 30,000 years!



To help humanity visualize the large scale of our universe, the American Museum of Natural History has produced a movie that begins with a view of the Earth's Himalayan Mountains and then zooms out: showing the orbits of Earth's satellites, the Sun, the Solar System, the extent of humanity's first radio signals, the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies nearby, distant galaxies, and quasars. Every object in the video has been rendered to scale using the best scientific research available in 2009. The film has similarities to the famous Powers of Ten video, which you can also see below:









And here is the famous Powers of Ten video:







So how does estimating scale and magnitude apply to skepticism and critical thought?



The pseudoscience of Homeopathy is a great example.