Killing 10 people is appalling. Killing a million is a statistic.

People can't visualize the difference between 1 in ten thousand and 1 in a million. But the first even will happen 100 times before the second happens once. We can fathom this on a theoretical scale, but when applied to our lives we don't act on it; gambling, medical procedures, travel decisions.

And we can't conceive facts like the entire computing power of every device ever made in history - every computer, every space shuttle, every super computer, every PS3 - does not come close to a single human brain.

And that in the summer of 1982 American banks lost more than their entire profits up to that point. Everything. And more.

It's like our brains just haven't develop to think at this scale. Any why would they? Evolutionarily (is that even a word?) we're still concerned with saber tooth tigers and picking berries.