> ...of how long dozens or hundreds of millions of years are.
"Hundreds of millions" is less than 30 bits of information. That's a miniscule, infinitesimal amount compared to what we're typically used to dealing with. (If you choose a random number every year, that's less that 1 gigabyte of numbers, not enough for a 30 minutes of an HD Marvel blockbuster.)
Yeah, mostly it's impressive in a biological or evolutionary context, not in a raw number context. You multiply everything by every genetic piece of data, multiplied by the environmental variables, and so on and so forth, until you arrive at something insanely complex, to an extent that's hard to overstate. There's not much that can't happen in 12-24my. Although I don't like to call anything incomputable, taken as a whole, it's pretty close to incomputable. Believing otherwise is often a trap.
To take one example, older paleo people would see fossils of creatures like nimravids, and they'd say to themselves, "oh, a long-lost ancestor of the sabretooth cats!" - but they're not getting how long ten million years is for living systems. Sabre teeth didn't evolve once, or twice, or even three times, but evolved separately at least six completely separate instances, across 200-300 million years. This is true for all sorts of morphology that might look incredibly distinctive to our human eyes, but which aren't actually distinctive in fact.
"Hundreds of millions" is less than 30 bits of information. That's a miniscule, infinitesimal amount compared to what we're typically used to dealing with. (If you choose a random number every year, that's less that 1 gigabyte of numbers, not enough for a 30 minutes of an HD Marvel blockbuster.)