How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?
Familiarity I guess. Mega isn’t really a widely used prefix outside of computers. We even say tons instead of megagrams.
And yet we say megatons.
But only in regards of nuclear bombs. Maybe it’s because of the scientific origins of these fields. Probably the same reasons why Americans measure firearm munition in mm.
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And 7.62 is just .30 caliber rebranded
I’ve only recently gotten my foid card and am learning to shoot and that shit confuses me so much.
and the old gauge system for shotguns.
But only in regards of nuclear bombs.
And your mom (⌐■-■)
we do list volcanic eruptions in megatons of TNT. The makers of the first a bomb pick it since the largest explosion ever made by then was a ship full explosives and some had calculated how many tons of TNT that ship was carrying
Instead of teragrams.
megaton, megawatt, megapascal, megacandela (for military flares), megahertz, megajoule, megaohm, megabequerel
Megatron
That’s a lot of Trons
That’s bad comedy
Megan
Damnit Meg
Yes, I think it’s a question of use. I can’t think of many examples where you would quickly need to know the measurement to the nearest Mm. Maybe if for some reason you deal with a lot of lunar orbits? Diameters of exoplanets?
Any earth distances we need to know with greater precision, and any stellar distances are probably better measured in light years, etc.
Odometer readings
“I’ve driven 112.326 megameters” takes the same amount of time to say as 112,326 kilometers. 🤷♂️
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Megameters sounds scary and I don’t want to alarm the people I’m talking to.
On Earth it’s just not needed. In nearby space it could make sense — distance to the Moon is 369 Mm. Distance to the Sun 149 Gm. But people aren’t good at visualizing the difference between kilo-, mega-, and giga-. It isn’t obvious from those numbers just how much further away the Sun is.
For interplanetary space and beyond the time it takes for light to cross the distance makes more sense, I’d say. The moon is about half a second away, the sun about eight minutes, Voyager I a bit less than twenty hours, Alpha Centauri or Barnard’s about four years, and so on…
That unit is used a lot in the space game Elite Dangerous. Never saw it used before that, but it made sense because it’s the next jump up in large units, and it also helps keep the UI clean looking.
I do. Unfortunately, I don’t have many opportunities to do so. Which may be the reason why people don’t say megameter.
As a KSP player I use megameters all the time lol.
Ah yes, Krazy Soup Plantation
Well mainly because where we might need to use these units, we have more standard non si units, we use AU, Light years and Parsecs where Megameters, Gm, TM etc would be useful
There’s also scientific notation which eliminates having to use these prefixes so you can more easily compare and manipulate numbers.
I wish we would. It sounds awesome to say.
Be the change you want to see!
Hopefully, you have many opportunities to use it.
nobody will stop you, i’ve seen some publications use gigagrams instead of thousands of tons
weirdly enough SI unit for mass is kg not grams
I’ve always found that strange. I guess a kilogram is a lot closer to “human scale” than a gram, maybe that’s why they picked it.
yeah humans do really need a small, inch and cm, a medium, meter and feet, and a big, mile and km.
SI also does meter instead of cm, so it overall checks out.
Having meter as a base unit makes more sense than kg because meter lacks any prefix.
But that is like a giant difference in what they usually measure
Here in Sweden and Norway we have the Scandinavian mile, “mil”, it is 10km.
We also use deciliter and centiliters, which is odd for some.
It is 2.445 kilomiles from Los Angeles to New York.
that’s a whole 12 Mft
38.73 megahands
Main reason is nearly no one needs to measure things in megameters. Megameters would be a unit to measure the diameter of planets in, maybe the orbital altitudes of some moons. Our moon for example is ~384Mm away. Distances between planets, distances between stars, and distance between galaxies are many, many orders of magnitude farther than that.
As most of us rarely travel more than 1,000 kilometers very often, it’s the biggest unit most people are familiar with on an intuitive level.
I’m still convinced people don’t actually use the metric system’s power of ten design. Like no one uses centigrams or kiloliters either. They’ve picked out units that are pretty close to the ones in the Imperial/Customary system, kilograms are used instead of pounds, grams are used instead of ounces, kilometers are used instead of miles, meters are used instead of yards, centimeters are used instead of inches, millimeters are used instead of sixteenths of an inch and so on. Want to confuse a European? Draw up some blueprints in hectometers.
oh I’ll have to do that at some time
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Scientific notation for everything: 5 x 10^6 m. Seriously though, I think it would be easier to think about it in megameters or gigameters if it were more standard to do so.
yeah but sadly not enough people know how to read that. sadface.
How many petameters is that?
This sounds like some electronic device they’d roll out in the UK used to detect pedophiles.
