5 Ways to Actually Understand Very Large Numbers

This video maybe should have been 15 minutes long so...just watch it 3 times and I promise you'll get it!!!

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[vlogbrothers]

Correction! I was wrong about how long it would take to drive to the moon. It's around 150 days to the drive to the moon and around 150 years to drive to the sun. WEIRD COINCIDENCE!

[milkshakebananaz]

“Including all of babies” is a lovely population qualifier because it makes me think of all of the babies.

[pabloemanuel]

The circumference of the Earth isn’t “luckily” almost exactly 40, 000 km. The meter was defined so that the circumference of the Earth (at least of the meridian that goes through Paris) would be exactly 40, 000 km. The only reason this is not exact are calculation errors when the measurements were made, in the late 18th century.

[MarcosProjects]

In case anyone is wondering why Hank chose $44B dollars when that seems like a pretty arbitrary number, that's the amount that Elon Musk is ostensibly going to pay to buy Twitter. Dividing that by a chosen number of people is a very interesting metric...

[naplinewander]

Are you gonna debate Erik or not? This is important

[quintingell]

"This video maybe should have been 15 minutes long so...just watch it 3 times and I promise you'll get it!!!" Good description. I will be rewatching at least twice to comprehend this

[jessicatiedeman]

It's so lovely seeing Hank's tweets come to life.

[ggenc]

My work involves communicating around data and so I found this really interesting and thought provoking! Thank you :) To kind of back up one of your points, I have learned that people relate much more to a data point if it is in terms of people. For example, if you say that 1 in 7 people are unemployed, it's more comprehensible than saying 14% of people are unemployed. Funny how our brains work!

[bradivany]

Dang. I knew a Hank Green/Internet Comment Etiquette crossover was too good to be true.
Now I need to find something else to do with this rocket ship...

[nixl_]

one thing that will never get in my head is how miniscule an atom is and just how many are in a handful of sand

[kevink]

This is an incredibly valuable in concise explanation, especially in the current world climate where understanding what reporting on large numbers and data containing large numbers actually means is increasingly important to the informed human experience.

[Battleteapot]

i think there might have been a calculation error with the earth/moon distance calculation. 250, 000 miles at 70 mph should only take 149 days. My mother drove 250, 000 miles on her car in 15 years and she wasn't driving 1/3rd of the day every day :)

[okayheykae]

I've always thought of myself as being bad at understanding numbers, but between watching this video and a book I read recently (Making Numbers Count) I think maybe being bad at understanding numbers is normal because we talk about them as numbers instead of things we actually understand?

[UsagiOhkami]

I'm REALLY bad with numbers (dyscalculia). From now on when someone gives me a price (like how my family keeps talking about the price of housing) I'm just gonna say, "How many books is that?" Because books, I definitely understand.

[EcceJack]

As an astrophysicist, I get a feel for the large the numbers eventually! In the end there's still a hierarchical organisation somewhere, but I know A LOT of large numbers that I can compare other numbers to

[JSR]

Few years ago I saw your chemistry crash course, I was about eight then. It was my gateway to youtube and internet as whole. Thanks for such a beautiful start to my journey discovering the internet!!

[robinclark]

I just started a data analysis job and this video couldn't have come to me at a better time.

[rickyn]

This video is coming to me the same day I was made fun of for measuring Chile in terms of California. “Americans will do anything to avoid the metric system, ” they said, which would be fair except for the fact that both 2700 miles and 4300 km mean nothing to me

[emilyalicedunn]

You inspired me to look up something I’d been wondering about: when we say “parts per million” it was feeling super abstract to me. I’d often wondered one of those questions you wonder when far from your phone and forget when you get near google again (there should be a word for that phenomenon btw). The question is: If I had a million drops of water, is that a bathtub or several bathtubs or a swimming pool? Well, turns out I’m not the first to wonder! It’s about 3 1/2 to 4 bathtubs of water. Now ppm makes total sense to me. Also, my childhood fairy tales measured distance in leagues all the time eg seven-league boots so I looked that up as well! When I was a kid, google wasn’t a thing so you reminded me to check it out. A league is 3 miles, or ~5 km. A single step in a pair of seven-league boots takes you 21 miles. Thank you so much!!

[barakfriedman]

Very informative and well presented. Could have been nice to bring one example of a very SMALL number, which is also hard to comprehend, let's say atomic sizes or the electric charge of the electron.