User blog comment:Edwin Shade/A Common Hyperbole/@comment-1605058-20171104115610

You circumvent the unimaginability of such large number by taking a one large entity consisting of this many units instead of considering the units by themselves (note that it would be just as difficult to try and imagine a billion individual seconds as it is to imagine a billion individual dots, or whatever other objects).

With this approach, using spatial imagination makes it easier to imagine such large numbers: for example, consider a cube with 1 meter long side. It already represents a billion cubic millimeters! In my humble opinion, it is much easier to imagine such a cube (heck, oftentimes you would be able to hold one yourself) than a span of 32 years. You can also tweak the units without losing imaginability, for example make the cube have side length 100 m or even 1 km, and consider how many cubic micrometers it contains (you can view micrometers with a decent microscope, but, for example, there is nothing that lets you "see" a microsecond).