The Trillion-Dollar Saganesque Big Number Fog

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LONG TAKE

Back when Carl Sagan was a thing, he was mocked (even by Johnny Carson though, if you are interested, here’s also an actually interesting, mostly serious, conversation between the two) for talking about the universe—stars, galaxies—using language that often depicted the scale of the universe using “billions and billions” as a yardstick for size or distance.

When Sagan told us, for example, that the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, was 40,000 light years away, well, it was appropriate to gasp because we could not truly comprehend in the human experience how to traverse that distance. It was too big. Knowing the granular details for comparison sake—how far a light year is, for example, compared to traveling to visit grandma on the other side of the country—wasn’t important. So, we simply filed that away as “it would not be possible, in the span of human existence, to make that journey, so I’m just going to accept the enormity of the number in awe and without question”.

The …