Ronnagrams: Scientists Create a New Metric To Weigh Earth

hese are increasing in size, such as infrastructure, yet from a technological perspective, things are also getting smaller, a lot smaller than they used to be. Therefore scientists felt the need to invent two new metric systems that would measure the biggest as well as the smallest things on Earth, including Earth itself, as well as other planets.

Please welcome Ronnagrams, which will be used to measure planets and potential countries primarily. Just to understand the scale of this metric, the weight of our Earth would equal six ronnagrams.

Scientific demand has increased prefixes since the SI was founded in 1960. The last time was in 1991, when the inclusion of zetta and yotta was motivated by scientists’ need to represent enormous molecular amounts. A yottameter consists of a one and 24 zeros.

At the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which controls the SI and usually meets every four years at Versailles Palace, west of Paris, scientists and government officials from all around the globe cast ballots in favor of the adjustment.

But according to Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, not even the mighty yotta can keep up with the world’s insatiable desire for data.

“If we think about mass, instead of distance, the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams,” which is a six followed by 27 zeroes

Richard Brown

Ronna, Quetta, Onto, and Quecto won the unanimous vote over bronto and Hella, two less scientific suggestions that had been gaining traction, if only among computer scientists.

The only remaining two letters in the alphabet not already used in measurement are the starting letters of the prefixes that received the most votes. The letters b for “bronto” and h for “hella” are already used for bytes and hecto, the prefix for 100, respectively.

“The point of having these prefixes and units is to ensure clear communication across disciplines. You need nomenclature that’s official and agreed on by everyone.”

Richard Brown

When it comes to the evolution of technology, data is the number one resource required, and the more data available, the better. However, data has become so exponential that new metrics are required. As more data is gathered, new metrics will be required to make things easier to comprehend, not only for scientists but for the computers processing the data.