Can I use this at work?
MystikIncarnate
joined 2 years ago
I like you.
These are all good points. Thank you.
Except an alien species wouldn't know what cesium is... We would need to represent it to them as it's molecular makeup, which is the only absolute representation of it, and would they know what a proton/neutron/electron are? Would they have a deeper understanding of the physics, and thereby have a different understanding of what we consider to be quantum particles?
We only generalize protons, elections and neutrons because we don't really know what those things are made up of. Maybe they do, so when we show them our representation of it, would it be too rudimentary for them to comprehend what we mean?
There's still a lot we don't know. And these are the kinds of questions that tickle my brain.
Doubt all you want, it's a free country afterall.
Some (just some) of the information I've seen on this indicates that the freeways built in North America are massively over built for the use case. The amount of underlying structure and support for the roads is not necessary and just serves to add costs with no tangible benefit to automotive travel to those that drive on it.
The only good reason to be so over built is so that the roadway can be used for something that isn't civilian traffic.... Like the road being used as a landing strip, or to support tanks and other heavy equipment rolling overtop without entirely annihilating the road.
But hey, you do your own research. Come to your own conclusions. I'm not telling you anything as fact here, just relaying what I've heard, and what, in my opinion, is true. But that's just like.... My opinion man.
This isn't entirely the case, but the reality is actually no different. Long story short, a major reason that most of the US interstate freeways exist and have been built the way they have been is because they will stand up to moving heavy machines, like tanks. There's long strips of straight Highway that can be used as runways.
The highway system was built so that in the event of a civil war, domestic uprising, or invasion, the military could more or less operate very adequately anywhere with a decent stretch of highway available, and some way to get there.
Until then, automobiles rarely had to travel very far each day, and couldn't really run any faster than a few dozen miles an hour, partly because of the challenges of the terrain.
Automotive companies then took advantage of the newly built infrastructure and sold faster vehicles that could drive farther....
So blame who you want, but it was a joint effort between the civilian government, military industrial complex, and capitalistic automotive manufacturers, that drove (pun intended) us to where we are now.
I don't think that was the idea when the second was created.
The solar rotation cycle is naturally divided into 365 rotations of Earth (give or take), each daily rotation was divided into 24 segments called hours, each hour was further divided into 60 units called minutes, and each minute was then further divided into 60 units which we call seconds.
In the modern era, we have refined how we measure a second by a very stable natural phenomenon, the emissions of cesium (which we also refer to as an "atomic" clock). But we got there first by dividing one of Earth's rotations by 86400. It just so happens that 9 192 631 770 oscillations from cesium also equals 1/86400th of one rotation of Earth.
Additionally, neither a "second" nor even "one rotation of Earth" would have any meaning to someone who has never been to earth before.
See, this is all fascinating for me. I love this stuff.
It's also a good exercise in recognizing the assumptions we make every day. I'm trying to get to a point where I can articulate my thoughts and I don't have to struggle through the curse of knowledge.
That could work for velocities, but any measure of distance is based on our notion of time, like "light year" (the distance light can travel in one rotation of the Earth around the sun), which is relative.
Even an AU is the distance from Earth to our sun.
To be fair, we don't really have another point of reference with which to measure stuff.
A good way to portray distance could be a blip the length of time it would take light to travel that far. Like an RF signal that lasts as long as it would take for light up travel from one edge of an object to the other edge of the object.
... It's a difficult problem to try to solve even as a mental exercise.
All units of measure are abstract.
I like metric because it's structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day? There's other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally "cycles per second"
I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn't really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn't even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ????? IDFK (neither would they). We base everything we know on the world around us, and that's entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we've only ever experienced life on this planet.
The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it's based on solid science about our solar system. It's still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?
It's wild we've made it this far, to be honest.
Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked... I guess all I'm really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it's just as abstract in its conception.
For some, there's little difference.
Make them into fertilizer! Yeah!
I assume everything I read on the Internet is someone's opinion. Unless it's about an Internet thing, by the company that made that thing.
Like finding usage articles for Windows/office/whatever, on Microsoft's website...