Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2005: 11) is a celebrated work of synthesis that attempts to:  

understand and appreciate—marvel at, enjoy even—the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level that isn’t too technical or demanding, but isn’t entirely superficial either.  

Bryson’s book is full of numbers. Some are exceedingly large, others unimaginably small, but all are made accessible to the general reader. He (2005: 20) insists dryly that:  

We mustn’t swoon over every extraordinary number that comes before us, but it is perhaps worth latching onto one from time to time just to be reminded of their ungraspable and amazing depth.  

An early treat is an astonishingly small quantity of time, Bryson points to the “0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or one ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second” that “scientists believe they can look back to… after the moment of creation.”  

Moving to the unfathomably large, Bryson (2005: 36-38) seems reassured that “statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good.” He informs us that estimates of the size of our own Milky Way:  

range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion—and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies.  

Bryson describes a trip to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri as “a sissy skip in galactic terms.” To travel the requisite 4.3 light years “would take at least twenty-five thousand years” in a spaceship.  

Bryson (2005: 594) ends the book on a cautionary note, citing E. O. Wilson’s succinct “one planet, one experiment.” We have been around for only “0.0001 per cent of the Earth’s history,” and, according to Bryson, we are “doubly lucky,” enjoying, "not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even in a multitude of ways, to make it better." For, Bryson, we have had significant beginner’s luck; truly appreciating the planet “is a trick that we have only just begun to grasp.”  

Bryson, Bill (2005) A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition. Broadway Books: Random House, New York.