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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Metric doesn't let people grasp large numbers.

4 Plutos sounds pretty close and I doubt most grasp the distance of Pluto

Only the US, Liberia, and Myanmar have a complete grasp of large numbers like, for example, fifty-seven.

Damn it, internet and rage bait culture. "Americans will use anything but metric" in refernce to using pluto distance as a metric is what I replied to, not metric vs mi.

Freaking HN.

19.312.128.000 km is a pretty big number, people can grasp that.

Metric is neither better or worse than anything else, in that regard.

Describing a distance as "4 Plutos" isn't that helpful when Pluto is too dim to see with the naked eye, and still only a dot with a good ground-based telescope.

Even smaller distances like "AU" are too big for a human mind, with the Earth itself being less than a pixel across if the orbits were drawn to scale on an 8K monitor.

> still only a dot with a good ground-based telescope.

That gives a pretty good feel for how far away it is!

What? No it doesn’t, you need to know how big it is for that, and most people don’t have a sense of scale that encompasses either the full size of Earth (how far have you tried hiking, even over multiple days? If it was the Pacific Crest Trail congrats but you’re unusual) nor the size range of planets.

Most stars (and galaxies) can be described with the same words I just used for Pluto, but stars and galaxies are thousands to trillions of times further away than Pluto.

It's not at all quantitative, obviously, but I think knowing that

- Pluto's the size of the moon, more or less. (Or even assuming it's ~Earth-sized), but... - ... can barely be seen from Earth, even with fancy equipment, and - ...The probe is 4x farther away than that.

Gives good "distant" vibes in a way that large numbers don't.

And yet literally the entire world aside from United States, Liberia, and Myanmar is able to grasp it perfectly.

So such a statement would either insinuate that Americans are genetically inferior somehow, or you're just culturally attuned to an outdated British system.

What are you talking about? Look at the context before you get outraged. The comparison to metric here is "plutos" kind of like measuring with bananas. Saying a million km is not the same as saying "one moon distance".

So genetically inferior that they are the only ones with a craft that is 4 Plutos away :)

Could have been 5 plutos if they used metric.

NASA uses metric

NASA are still Americans. I'm not arguing about metric or imperial being better.

Parent claims genetic inferiority for not grasping metric, NASA does, so they are excluded in the first place.

Same with "military" time.

NASA didn’t begin to standardize on metric until 1990. Far after Voyager was developed and launched.

NASA already used metric internally for the moon landings

https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...

And I doubt that calculations for the voyager mission where done in imperial. The output and for contractors yes, but internally it's metric.

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