How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?
Megamind?!
Yeah but the real question is how many is a Brazilian?
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.
As a KSP player I use megameters all the time lol.
Ah yes, Krazy Soup Plantation
In our primary schools, we learn our children mili, deci, centi, deca, hecto and kilo, and how to calculate between them.
Beyond that or below that is used either in science classes or specific usecases and not known by the whole population at large.
Since people use what they know, they’d never use mega as a common way of measuring. We mostly use km for distance, and only in specific cases we might use, say, hectometers or decameters.
5 megameter is not wrong, but I don’t call 34 cm 3,4 decimeters either(unless decimeters make sense of course :p)
How many petameters is that?
This sounds like some electronic device they’d roll out in the UK used to detect pedophiles.
I wish we would. It sounds awesome to say.
Jokes on you elite dangerous uses Mm/s for lowest speeds in supercruise before it changes to “c” for relative to light speed
Familiarity I guess. Mega isn’t really a widely used prefix outside of computers. We even say tons instead of megagrams.
megaton, megawatt, megapascal, megacandela (for military flares), megahertz, megajoule, megaohm, megabequerel
Megatron
To be fair, mass is weird because the base unit is kg (yes, the name includes a prefactor). I have no idea how they managed to fuck it up that badly.
And yet we say megatons.
Instead of teragrams.
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.
But only in regards of nuclear bombs.
And your mom (⌐■-■)
Firearm’s ammunition is a mixed bag because many military sizes are standardized with the rest of NATO. 5.56, 7.62, and 9 mm sure; but then you get a bunch measured in caliber .308, .45, .50.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve seen megameters used in the context of astronomical distances, but not terrestrial ones. I think terrestrially, the familiarity of kilometers helps with a sense of scale.
Megameters sounds scary and I don’t want to alarm the people I’m talking to.
Not much need to use Mm, it doesn’t come up very often. So when it does it’s easier to use thousands of km so as to not confuse people with “another” measurement.
We routinely count vehicle odometers in thousands of kilometers, AKA Megameters. I’d say it’s a common enough measurement to popularize Megameters
Aside of kilometers there used to be “myriameter” (a myriad meters = 10,000 m = 10 km).
Fun thing, in Sweden they use mil for 10 km. In Finland there’s peninkulma for 10 km, but it’s very archaic.
I do. Unfortunately, I don’t have many opportunities to do so. Which may be the reason why people don’t say megameter.
