I don't think even Sagan said it better than this. I'm just not sure what was up with the clip of Rutger Hauer from Blade Runner.
Familiarity can breed contempt with the cosmic scale of deep time and space. We throw around numbers like millions and billions as though it was nothing, and I find sometimes that I have become so used to it that I think I actually understand what these numbers mean.
I don't. Neither do you.
The human brain cannot comprehend a number like a million. It isn't made to. We can hold a number like a hundred in our head, and with a little effort, a thousand. Beyond that, it gets sticky. Draw a timeline stretching across your wall spanning 6,000 years, all of human recorded history and then some. If you stare at it long enough, you might be able to, just barely, fit the whole thing in your head, and understand it as multiples to the length of your life. But you have no fucking concept of a million.
Try all the conceptual games you want. The age of the universe is a calender year. The age of the Earth is the distance between your outstretched arms. These tricks may give you a sense of relative length; the age of the Earth is this much longer than the time that complex life has existed; dinosaurs lasted this much longer than the human species; but you don't understand those numbers in absolute terms. You have NO IDEA.
It always boggles my mind a little when scientists are accused of making the human species insignificant, as though the size of the universe, or the length of time that the Earth has existed, makes our span short and unimportant. I refer to this as looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Our (relatively) minuscule corner of the universe is amazing. The sliver of geologic time we exist in is amazing. The human species is amazing. Your individual life is amazing. It isn't that we are billions of times less important than the scale of time and space; rather that the universe is a billion times more extraordinary because it can hold the human species, and billions and trillions of things that are just as incredible...and unlike the tiny, petty myths of religion, the amazing things that science shows us are, as far as we can tell, actually real.
Like the creator of this clip, I have a hard time sometimes comprehending what people see in religion, or ever have.
Excuse me now, I have to go take a leak.
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Actually, it's easy to understand a million of some things. Sugar cubes, for example: if the cubes are 1 cm along each side, then a million of them is just a 1 m cube.
The problem comes when you can't cheat by packing those million things into a 3d (or at least 2d) space, but have to try to understand them all in a straight line. That, I can't do.
"Like the creator of this clip, I have a hard time sometimes comprehending what people see in religion, or ever have." -- that may say more about your lack of vision than about the thing you've not been able to see. Just saying.
Oh, and: it's "minUscule".
Most people NEED to be told how to live, what to think, how to dress, or how to kill people who are different. Thinking critically is hard work Jeff, and I suppose it must be very comforting to think that even though a being with the power to create everything in existence loves you more than any of those other creations. Even if he is a royal dick about how he shows it.
What has always baffled me is the reaction of Christians (the group I have the most experience conversing with) who express incredulity that the earth could be billions of years old. Seriously? You've just told me that your god created all that exists, from nothing, in six days, and set in motion this elaborate plan requiring the torture and murder of his son to redeem humanity for the bizarre rules outlining sins (some of which are dietary restrictions!?!) that he also created that violate every set of instincts that govern the behavior of said humans that he programmed that way, but you think it unlikely that the Earth could be more than six thousand years old? I know that you are the enabling wife in this abusive relationship, but are you really full of such doubt about the powers of this magical entity that you would limit your conception of what it is capable of?
Rutger Hauer just serves to make an awesome clip even awesomer.
Mike Taylor's cubes is an OK example, but let's stick with linear measures (unless you can imagine stacking years like cubes, which doesn't feel right to me).
Anybody familiar with the metric system has a pretty good idea what a millimetre is (hold your finger and thumb this far apart, and you can tell whether they're too close, too far or roughly right). A million of those is a kilometre, a distance you can (probably) easily walk and at which you can (probably) pick out and identify medium-sized objects like a house, tree or car. It's not such a hurdle to see that those distances are comparable and comprehensible, and that's what a million means.
I guess the Rutger Hauer clip was an afterthought when the vidmaker realised he was unintentionally echoing a line of the replicant's monologue, but maybe it was planned that way from the start (I don't have the script memorised or a sound card on this crappy work machine, or I'd quote the original here). Anyway, pretty awesome video. Thirty... Billion... Years...!!!
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