We’re drowning in numbers we don’t understand

Four astronauts flew around the Moon. Artemis II launched at the beginning of this month, and the crew was farther from Earth than any human has been in more than 50 years. The mission covered nearly 700,000 miles.

When you read that number, do you feel it? Or does it blur past like all the other large numbers in the news this week? Like the billions spent on the war in Iran, the $73 billion in domestic spending cuts proposed in the new federal budget, and the $1.5 trillion allocated for defense? 

We are drowning in numbers, and we no longer understand what they mean. Every day, headlines bombard us with figures meant to inform: billions in spending, trillions in debt, percentages signaling growth or decline. But for most of us, these numbers blur together. They register as “large” or “small,” but almost never as real. And that is more than a math problem. It is a civic one.

We struggle because human intuition was never built for numbers this large.

I learned this from my stepfather, an amateur astronomer since childhood. In 1995, he rode his bicycle across the U.S., about 3,000 miles. The diameter of the Earth is roughly 8,000 miles, so if he could ride through the center of it, the trip would take about 18 weeks. The sun’s diameter is about 100 times that of Earth, so riding across it would take roughly 37 years — a long journey, but within a human lifetime.

The distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (not including our own sun), is........

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