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A comment on Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second?. Parent comment

Re:Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second? by furyofantares on Thursday June 22, 2023 @08:51PM (#36441315)
I don't even know the scale of the earth, or even the state I live in, in a way that makes any physical or intuitive sense to me. It's almost purely a mathematical understanding.

It's always fun to see the repeated scale analogies as you build your way to enormous sizes and distances, starting with something familiar, zooming to something 100 or 1000 times bigger, doing it again and again. It engages our physical understanding while counting zeroes 2 or 3 at a time, but I don't think it actually gives us any physical understanding. It really is just counting zeroes.

I just don't think there's any chance you or anyone else has any idea how far Jupiter is except as a calculation.

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Re:Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second? by dylan604 on Thursday June 22, 2023 @11:24PM (#36442419)
>or even the state I live in

I can wake up in my hometown, drive west for 12 hours, and still be in the same state. I know how big my state is in those terms. How many miles is that? How many football fields is that? How many times does light cross the room during that travel distance?

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Re:Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second? by 2143 on Friday June 23, 2023 @12:11AM (#36442701)
Depends on your average speed.
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Re:Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second? by fredley on Friday June 23, 2023 @02:55AM (#36443687)
The traffic can be that bad where I am too.
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Re:Do You Know How Much Your Computer Can Do in a Second? by arp242 on Friday June 23, 2023 @08:21AM (#36445837)
> I just don't think there's any chance you or anyone else has any idea how far Jupiter is except as a calculation.

I agree, it's very hard – almost impossible – to really "understand" things at scales that are so far outside of our human experience and intuition. However, "near Jupiter" does put things in to relative proportion, whereas "X million miles" doesn't.

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