I noticed this with vehicles. Odo has 100,000 km on it? Nah, it’s 100 megameters. It just sounds cooler
0.1 gigameters
Megagram is the official SI term for the weight. Metric tonne is non-SI but happens to be equivalent to a megagram and became the more common parlance (where I am, at least) by historical accident.
Pretty sure they tried to mimic existing units/terms to make it “easier”. So they used tonne to mimic ton.
They didn’t mimic existing units, an imperial ton is close to a metric ton, and the spelling tonne is just an alternative spelling of ton. In some parts ton means imperial ton, and tonne means metric ton, but it’s not standardized. In German, where the word originally comes from, it’s Tonne (btw the e is not silent, it’s [ɛ] as in let. Or in Porsche (no, it’s not pronounced porsh…).)
They mimicked existing terms, otherwise we wouldn’t have ever had the term metric tonne. It would have been called a megagram.
One magnesium please. yes I’m sure, only one.
Earth’s circumference is 40 Mm. 1 AU is 14 Gm. I could get used to this.
The moon is 400Mm away. Never say thousand kilometers again, the mega is the way.
Imaging if we started saying millions of kilobytes instead of GB.
The Andromeda galaxy is ~23.6 Zm away. The metric system reaches far.
I sometimes use millitonne (mt) instead of kilogram to keep people on their toes. I’ve learned that some people doesn’t like to have their weight measured in any kind of tonne.
But then what would a metric fuckton be?
A Megafuck.
