Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe we have Ronald Reagan to thank for cancelling our efforts from the 70s.
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Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
101–110 of 215 posts
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
weird question for anyone with the relevant knowledge, would 25 ronna-Reagans in one place behave differently than our sun? I know that mass would be mostly oxygen, but at that scale does it matter?
You should ask Randall Munroe! :) http://what-if.xkcd.com
Upping the mass to the sun size would cause some interesting additional wrinkles because now we're talking about being large enough to have "problems" with the pressures in the middle being sufficient to start causing atoms to squish together, but it would take an astronomer to be clear on what happens next. My gut and layman's understanding says you might get a pretty big boom in a couple hundred thousand years or so, because you'd basically be building a sun that would be fairly far along its fuel consumption cycle.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
One ronna-reagan is approximately 4% of the sun's mass: https://www.google.com/search?q=%28185+pounds%29+*+10%5E27+%... At least if I have that right. A single Reagan's mass is from: https://www.celebheights.com/s/Ronald-Reagan-1750.html Or, if you prefer, our sun as about 25 ronna-Reagans.
weird question for anyone with the relevant knowledge, would 25 ronna-Reagans in one place behave differently than our sun? I know that mass would be mostly oxygen, but at that scale does it matter?
By mass, the sun is 71% Hydrogen and 27.1% Helium, the last 1.9% or so being heavier elements (much of that being oxygen.
I’m no expert, but I suspect a mass of 25 ronna-Reagans would not make a very good star. I imagine it might collapse into a dense Oxygen and Carbon rich sphere, and in that environment various chemical reactions might turn it into some other kind of material.
But maybe I’m way off.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#104Pretty nice table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix "(...) he had the idea for the update when he saw media reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as brontobytes and hellabytes. (...)" and "The only letters that were not used for other units or other symbols were R and Q" So it seems the new prefixes are partly initiated by the exponential computer storage needs rather than scientif…
Eg: 1 QB (quettabyte) == 1,000,000 YB (yottabytes) == 1 MYB (mega-yottabyte)
Without the new prefixes, we could have gone to 1 YYB (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10^48 bytes)
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#105Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#106Title sounds like the basis for a yo momma joke.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#107Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#108From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system : “The SI has been adopted as the official system of weights and measures by all nations in the world except for Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States.”
As a practical matter, we use metric for many things in the US. The fact that we do not force everyone to change their customary units to metric really seems to irk some folks, but mostly outside the US.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#109Via https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03747-9 , "Extreme numbers get new names": The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 10^27 and 10^30, and ronto and quecto signify 10^−27 and 10^−30. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram. This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when the organization added zetta (10^21), zepto (10^−21), yotta (10^24) and yocto (…