[SeaLion]

continental drift rates average somewhere around 10% of the growth rate of your fingernails. In a billion years (do the math), that's more than fast enough for a continent to relocate halfway across the earth.

But you've touched on one of the big problems many people have about understanding ToE: small brains (like mine, I admit) just don't handle really big numbers.

That's why Creationists get away with bogus analogies, like coming up with a huge number supposedly representing the odds against homo sapiens arising through natural selection, or the odds against a whirlwind in a junkyard assembling a 747 (which is so far removed from ToE--but I'm preaching to the choir).

It's just hard to grasp how just how long is a billion years. A half hour of Barney the Dinosaur can feel that long, and I nearly gave up hope that the interminable Clinton Age would ever end!

[Quark2005]

But you've touched on one of the big problems many people have about understanding ToE: small brains (like mine, I admit) just don't handle really big numbers.

I have to admit there was a point (a long time ago) that I had some skepticism about evolution's ability to work in the amount of time it did, until I started making some rudimentary calculations like that. Given the way life is seen to change on earth, a better question than "how could major evolutionary changes occur in that amount of time?" would be "how could they not?"

It has nothing to do with the limitation of anyone's brain - a billion years is just too big a quantity for anyone to visualize without actually doing the math. (All people's brains are small in the grand scheme of things...)

[Junior]

A billion years is more than a million of Methuselah's lifetimes (969 years). It is more than 600,000 times longer than the span between the creation of the world and the Great Flood (1656 years).

Maybe that might help some of them grasp the actual time spans involved.