People who have anywhere near enough number sense to think about that in any concrete way are much rarer than you might think. And people who don’t automatically think numerically also don’t automatically make what you and I would think are obvious comparisons to facts they do know.
For one personal example, my mom (who was in the top 5% of her high school class, who went to college, and who by most metrics is smarter and better educated than a majority of the US population) once told me she wasn’t sure whether a million or a billion is bigger, or by how much. And she was telling the truth, she really didn’t have a clear mental image or conceptual understanding of those numbers, even though she personally lives in a house valued at just over $1 million. Facts like that just didn’t occur to her as being relevant to the question of which number is bigger or by how much. For someone like that, million/billion/trillion/etc. are all just strings of letters that evaluate to an identical concept of “large number.”
