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I'm going to type out my unfiltered thoughtprocess. And not use a calculator or spend more than 30 seconds per problem because that would be against the Spirit of Fermi estimation.
I know that the sun is 150*10^6 km away and the nearest start is 4 lightyears away. So it would be cheating.
But fuck that, I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.
So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.
Wild out of my ass guess would be the ball is outside the atmosphere of earth.
Revelation: Annnddd I was wayyy off. By an order of magnitude.
I know Andromeda is 2*10^6 light years away.
Repeat the same process as before.
Revelation: Wild overestimate again. Off by many orders of magnitude.
I need to get better at intuiting ratios.
Also, a persons Fermi estimating abilities are a very good indicator of how much they read as a child. Serious.
Many of the intuitions such as astronomic distances, evolutionary timelines, depth of natural features like the oceans are things I learned straight out of my middle school textbooks or Children's encyclopedias.
Sounds like you are treating the baseball as the size of the earth's orbit around the sun, rather than the size of the sun itself. But that would give you an answer that's too small rather than too big so idk how you got your answer.
I am confused about your reasoning here...are you calculating (4 years / 8 minutes) * (radius of baseball / radius of sun)? That would give you a unitless value, not a distance. I think you were using the wrong values in your calculation but I can't tell what you were using.
You are right, I goofed by taking the distance from earth to the sun instead of the size of the sun. The answers being even remotely a few orders of magnitude away is a coincidence.
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I feel like the magnitudes involved in interstellar and intergalactic distances are so vast that it's not really a mark against your intuition that you find it difficult to wrap your head around. For everyone that isn't an astronomer it's really just trivia anyway.
Whereas people work with and talk about money all the time, so I think people should be expected to have better intuition in that regard.
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