Hacker News Reader

We need to standardize on using Earth circumferences as the unit of length. Or better, football fields! (the type of football of course being implied by the website's ccTLD)

View on HN

We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!

We should just redefine it to make the speed of light a nice even 300.000 km/s - we are so close already!

But it's already a nice round 10m/s in base 299,792,458.

Why stop there when we could just as easily redefine it to be 1 (new base unit of length)/second or 1 meter/(new base unit of time)?

How hard would it be to fix this? Could we theoretically add or subtract enough material or make whole thing slightly more dense or less dense to compensate?

Per Wikipedia, the discrepancy is approximately 74 km, so digging a ditch with an average depth of approximately 74/2π ≅ 12 km around the circumference of the Earth would theoretically fix the problem.

Feasibility and geological implications are left as exercises for the reader.

Regardless, I suspect a more cost-effective fix would be to redefine the meter to be a couple "legacy" millimeters longer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com