How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?
I’ve seen megameters used in the context of astronomical distances, but not terrestrial ones. I think terrestrially, the familiarity of kilometers helps with a sense of scale.
The beauty of the metric system is you don’t lose a sense of scale from using a higher unit because you can intuitively know 1Mm is 1000km.
True, but not everyone has that in the forefront of their mind at all times. Just like using millions of dollars and billions of dollars in the same sentence can distract people from the scale, the same is true for SI prefixes in non-technical settings. Like, say, negotiations over buying a used car.
Not much need to use Mm, it doesn’t come up very often. So when it does it’s easier to use thousands of km so as to not confuse people with “another” measurement.
We routinely count vehicle odometers in thousands of kilometers, AKA Megameters. I’d say it’s a common enough measurement to popularize Megameters
We already have this in Sweden. 10km in Sweden is 1 mil (Swedish mile).
When we sell/buy used cars and other types of vehicles we always count the mileage in Swedish miles.
Kilometers work but is just absurd when you start talking about 100k+ kms.
Aside of kilometers there used to be “myriameter” (a myriad meters = 10,000 m = 10 km).
Fun thing, in Sweden they use mil for 10 km. In Finland there’s peninkulma for 10 km, but it’s very archaic.
In our primary schools, we learn our children mili, deci, centi, deca, hecto and kilo, and how to calculate between them.
Beyond that or below that is used either in science classes or specific usecases and not known by the whole population at large.
Since people use what they know, they’d never use mega as a common way of measuring. We mostly use km for distance, and only in specific cases we might use, say, hectometers or decameters.
5 megameter is not wrong, but I don’t call 34 cm 3,4 decimeters either(unless decimeters make sense of course :p)
