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Bing says Alpha Centauri is 13.6 kilometers from us (imgur.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

41.5 petameters.

Nobody using the metric system says "trillion kilometers"! 🌞

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    41.5 petameters.

    https://coco1453.wordpress.com/thinking-in-metric-for-astronomy/

    Nobody using the metric system says “trillion kilometers”!

    Unfortunately way too many people do even though it is not the correct SI unit for the scale, simply because 'kilometer' is the metric distance unit used for Earth distances. I have astronomy distances memorized as metric SI distances and I only care about the km distance so I can convert that to the SI distance. e.g. When I see "trillion kilometers" I convert that in my head to "quadrillion meters" which I then convert to "petameters".

    I would rather see the base unit 'meters' than km so I can skip a step. My own preference for astronomy distance units is:

    metric SI units > meters > kilometers > non metric units

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Hmm now that I read that article I was thinking about the poor computers who all run on power of 2. What we really should do is switch to base 1024 instead. It makes sense to optimize for the true representation of numbers in these spacecraft.

    36.86 pebimeters. Lets make it happen! 🤣

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