How Does A clever way to estimate enormous numbers - Michael Mitchell Work?

This clever way to estimate enormous numbers is like having a super-powered magnifying glass that helps you see how big something really is, even if it seems impossible.

Imagine you have a giant jar full of tiny jellybeans, so many, you can't count them all. But instead of counting every single one, you take a handful and count those. Then you guess how many handfuls fit in the whole jar. That’s estimating!

Michael Mitchell uses something similar but with numbers that are way bigger than jellybeans, like the number of stars in the sky or grains of sand on a beach.

He starts by looking at what he can count, like how many people live in one city. Then he thinks about how many cities there are in a country, and how many countries there are in the world. By multiplying those smaller numbers together, just like multiplying jellybean handfuls, he gets a really good guess for something huge.

It’s like figuring out how many steps it would take to walk from one end of the planet to the other, by first counting how many steps you take in one minute, and then guessing how long it would take to walk all the way.