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Comment on Dark Matter Black Holes Could Fly through the Solar System Once a Decade

The earth is estimated to “weigh” 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds. (That is weird when you think about it. The weight of the earth being based on what something weighs on earth, I mean.)

Mt. Everest is only about 357,000,000,000,000 pounds and is just a tiny fraction of the mass of the earth.

So. My point is that we need a better way to portray scale of things in the universe. AUs work to a point but then we have to quickly move to parsecs. Parsecs quickly give way to light years. Light years kinda work, but only for between 14-26 billion years. Even after all of that, I can hardly still fathom the size of Mt. Everest. (This was a rant, but not an angry rant.)

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floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

The earth is estimated to “weigh” 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds.

Mt. Everest is only 357,000,000,000,000 pounds

My point is that we need a better way to portray scale of things in the universe.

Well, for a start, God uses the metric system.

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- Mr_Blott@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Fuckin everyone uses the metric system
  
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  - RandomVideos@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Even aliens building the pyramids used the metric system
    
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- butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  God uses base 12, he doesn’t arbitrarily settle on base 10 just because he has that many fingers.
  
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barsquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I cannot fathom the size of anything on an astronomical scale. I have seen the videos that zoom out and show Earth at scale with the Sun and then the Sun at scale with other stars. No matter how many times I view the facts it will be incomprehensibly large.

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chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Weight in pounds isn’t the right unit here. Weight varies depending on the strength of the gravitational field you’re in, whereas mass does not. A kilogram here on earth weighs 2.2lbs but on the moon it only weighs 0.36lbs.

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- Rato@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  In the English Engineering System, the unit of mass is 1 pound mass (lbm), and is equivalent to the amount of matter that weighs 1lb at 1G. I won’t argue that EES is a good system, but it does at least have a kludged unit for mass. It has an equally kludged unit for force, too, called pounds force (lbf).
  
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- remotelove@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I called that out. It was the weight of the earth… on earth.
  
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