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I have never heard of the use of kilo/mega/giga used for standard mass or distance units, either in the media, scientific literature or anywhere else (except ki
by beAbU 4y ago
I have never heard of the use of kilo/mega/giga used for standard mass or distance units, either in the media, scientific literature or anywhere else (except kilometer, and kilogram, but kg IS actually the standard unit, not g)
Only place where I've witnessed it's use is during my own personal musings while sitting on the loo. Same goes for money. "Gigadollars" has a nice ring to it but it's not used :(
There are other units of measurement when the numbers get really big, like AU, lightsecond/minute/year, Solar Mass, etc. I'm no scientist, but I also think when you get to the astonomical scale, order-of-magnitude relative measurements is more useful knowing a galaxy's mass to the nearest gram.
- perilunar 4y agoNo, they don't get used, but they should be. We all understand metric prefixes now, and use them for other units. I'm saying we should stop using "thousands/millions/billions of" kilometres/kilograms, and start using mega/giga/tera metres/grams.
- beAbU 4y agoMeh, I honestly dont think you lose or gain anything going either way. Spoken language is messy AF and I honestly don't see it helping. Case in point, people might think you are conflating nuclear bombs and mass if you say "this ship weighs 5 megatons". Also depending on who you ask, gigagram either sounds like way more, or way less, than 1000 tons. And for scientific writing, 1e9g is about as clear and explicit as it gets.
- wongarsu 4y agoHowever they are frequently used for tons (the megagram variety, not sure about imperial). Kilotons are of course famous because we measure explosions and other forces in kiloton-tnt-equivalents, but Megatons and Gigatons are also used (the later commonly for emitted CO2)