When I read Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” there was one analogy which I will never forget:
Stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of Earth. All of complex life is in one hand, and “in a single stroke with a nail file you could eradicate human history.”
With this simple explanation, you can suddenly visualize how young we (Homo sapiens) really are.
It’s fun to think of other things which can be visualized in a similar way. You just need a bit of imagination. If something is very big, or very small, you just need to do some simple math and compare it with something else. Here are a few of my visualizations: