It’s a Mag World

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

– Douglas Adams (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

The universe is very large, but it is not infinite. All quantities in the universe (distance, time, energy, mass, etc) exist within 50 to 100 orders of magnitude.

The human species interacts with only 25 of these magnitudes. Humans before the year 1900 only knew of about 15 of them.

When we go about our daily lives, we have to focus on a single magnitude, and this linear perspective might include a couple of magnitudes higher and lower. The rest of the magnitudes get blurred out as either “too small to care about” or “too big to care about”.

However, there is a way to zoom out and get a larger perspective. This is particularly useful when dealing with quantities of widely different magnitudes, like the past 50 years of computer memory, or wealth distribution, or any kind of napkin estimation.

The Mag Scale is Universal

You can put every quantity in the world on a scale where 0 is human-scale, and every number higher means 10x more (and every number lower means 1/10th as much).

For every dimension, this scale basically runs from -10 to +10, and every level has an appreciably different feel. (This scale sometimes goes to 11, for example the size of the solar system is ↑11 meters, but even the size of the entire universe is only ↑27 meters. Which should indicate both how “universal” this scale is, and also how big the universe is!)

Magnitude Notation

This is unnecessarily complicated, because scientific notation was never really designed by anyone. For instance, the magnitude is the most important part of any number, and yet in scientific notation, it’s obscured by a bunch of numeric clutter. It’s tucked away at the very end in a smaller font, like a footnote. On top of that, it’s difficult to type and speak and read and copy-paste.

We use ^ or ↑ as a sigil to indicate the following number is a magnitude. For example:

This notation makes common operations much simpler. To multiply two numbers in Mag World, you add them together. So if light speed is ↑8.5 meters per second and a year is ↑7.5 seconds, how far is a light-year?

↑8.5 × ↑7.5 = ↑16 meters

We can add more precision if we want (a light-year is actually ↑15.976 meters), but for almost all intents and purposes, it’s completely unnecessary. We don’t need it unless we’re trying to get to the Moon, in which case, we have computers.

Each Mag Level Feels Different

In Mag World, numbers are usually rounded to the nearest integer or half integer. Rounding makes it easier to remember basic numeric facts and do math with them in your head. But also, it makes the differences between magnitudes clearer. For thinking and talking and writing about big ideas, this is often more important.

For instance, on the mag size scale, the Moon is ↑6.5 meters, the rocky planets are ↑7, the gas giants are ↑8, and the Sun is ↑9. These different configurations of matter are essentially correlated to their size: Earth can’t be the size of Jupiter; rocky planets simply don’t come that big. And Jupiter can’t be the size of Earth; gas planets don’t come that small.

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