The Tonic offers, via Submitterator, a handy series of images that helps visualize great, big, scary old numbers, in order to make them a little less meaningless.
It starts with a single 1 cubic millimeter block, and builds up from there, until you get something the size of a skyscraper.
There's also some nifty facts about things that happen in quadrillions, though I don't know how accurate they are. To wit:
This [quadrillion] is a number so huge, it has basically no practical applications (unless you wanted to talk about the number of ants that lived in the past 2 and a half years).
Back to the human brain: it's estimated that our synapses each fire about 300 to 400 times per second, but at peak moments they can fire as many as 1000 times a second. It's impossible for every synapse to fire at the same time, but we can still calculate the upper limit of possible brain events per second. Given the estimate of 60 to 100 trillion synapses, that means it would take between 18 and 100 of these mammoth, skyscraper-sized blocks to represent the range in the number of events the human brain is capable of sustaining in a single second. That's a whole city! And in 10 seconds? That's right: it would take up to 1,000 of them — 1 quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) mm³ in total.
Ignis Fatuus: A Quadrillion To Scale
