How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?

    • LostXOR
      link
      fedilink
      31 year ago

      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.

      • Aatube
        link
        fedilink
        21 year ago

        SI also does meter instead of cm, so it overall checks out.

          • Aatube
            link
            fedilink
            11 year ago

            But that is like a giant difference in what they usually measure

      • @[email protected]OP
        link
        fedilink
        21 year ago

        yeah humans do really need a small, inch and cm, a medium, meter and feet, and a big, mile and km.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      11 year ago

      My physics teacher once told us that this was due to the influence of disciplines that calculate with huge masses, say in astrophysics the weight of a planet or the the amount of oxygen within it. Don’t know how much of it is true but the basic tenet of everyone preferring the numbers that they work with on a daily basis having as few prefixes as possible as it makes mentally handling and remembering them easier.