too big to sense

[keannu]

It's quoting two exmaples for something too big to sense. but what is the writer trying to say about The smell of gasoline going into a car’s tank ? We can understand it's gas we smell everyday, but its origin or something?

ex) When faced with things that are too big to sense, we comprehend them by adding knowledge to the experience. The first appearance of a shining star in a darkening evening sky can take you out into the universe if you combine what you see with the twin facts that the star is merely one of the closest of the galaxy’s 200 billion stars and that its light began traveling decades ago. The smell of gasoline going into a car’s tank during a refueling stop, when combined with the fact that each day nearly a billion gallons of crude oil are refined and used in the United States, can allow our imagination to spread outward into the vast global network of energy trade and politics.

 

[Tdol]

The writer's using the familiar smell of gasoline to try to provide a link to the incomprehensible size of the oil extraction industry- if we have something we understand ad can connect to, it may help us come closer to understanding them if we link with the familiar.

 

[keannu]

The writer's using the familiar smell of gasoline to try to provide a link to the incomprehensible size of the oil extraction industry- if we have something we understand ad can connect to, it may help us come closer to understanding them if we link with the familiar.

But the gasoline seemed to belong to experience, and the oil extraction industry seemed knowledge and by the two, the author was trying to draw the vast global network of energy trade and politics. There should be something big hard to sense initially, so only the gas seemed the big one that can initiate your knowledge, but actually it's not. I'm all confused.

 

[Tdol]

We start with the familiar smell, which allows us to think that the US uses a billion barrels a day, maybe through thinking of all the people filling their cars everywhere, and then this takes us into the wider and bigger area of global energy trading, with the drilling, shipping, etc. (smell + 1 billion and then on to the global level)