A super high overview of something like relativity is that, at different levels in our existence, certain things are happening lightning fast and certain things are happening extremely slowly and that is completely “relative”. What I mean by that is the lifespan of a mayfly is about one day. It does a lot in that one day including making babies. Our life is 100 years while the lifetime of certain plants can be 10 times that long; and the lifetime of a planet is unimaginably longer. Earth has (probably) been around for billions and billions of years and we are going to total it out in what would appear (relatively) to be a small fraction of 1 ms. But that’s not my point. My point is that people have a hard (impossible) time understanding how 4 billion years could go by on the surface of an atom, at the nuclear level. Sort of a takeoff on “Horton hears a who”. I could play an audio clip for you that sounds like drum beats. Extremely short staccato snare taps. You would not be able to understand how an entire opera could fit into that snare taps right?. How could all those notes be hit so quickly? how all those words could be fit into a single sound. How could so many pieces be in a single sound. To show you, I would play the opera for you but 10 times faster than normal. You would hear that every note every word every passage as audited. I would then play the opera 100 times faster; you could make it out as a musical piece, sort of. Then I would play it 1000 times faster, all those notes would still happen, all the music would be there, every word, every note, but it would sound like one short sound. To us. Relatively. To the Mayfly that 1000x opera could sound normal. Relatively. That is why Humankind looks like scarcely more than an instantaneous blur or snap of static electricity, to rocks. That to trees, we move so fast that they cannot perceive us. That in the billions-of-years viewpoint of planets (besides their seemingly instantanous spoilage), we don’t even exist.
