Comment by mulmen
3 years ago
125 million dollars is precisely nothing in the scheme of interplanetary exploration and we already learned our lesson. I would expect someone so obsessed with radix 10 as yourself to understand orders of magnitude.
In the places it matters the US already uses the metric system. This has been true for more time than Germany has used the metric system.
Since the time the metric system was created a world war was fought, centered around a misguided sense of supremacy. The people with a sense if moderation and the ability to compromise in the face of real constraints won the war. The adherents to strict philosophy were destroyed.
The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because of a miscommunication. We could have done it all in IS Customary units. Nobody did any calculations in their head. This is a hard task. We learned from that, as we always do. The US has still led the largest presence on Mars. We know what we are doing.
> Since the time the metric system was created a world war was fought, centered around a misguided sense of supremacy. The people with a sense if moderation and the ability to compromise in the face of real constraints won the war. The adherents to strict philosophy were destroyed.
Out of the countries that won that war, all but one have either switched to the metric system, or were already using it. So did all the countries who lost that war. In fact, every country other than Myanmar, Liberia, and the US officially uses the metric system.
So what exactly does WWII have to do with using, or not using the metric system, the ability to compromise, or the mathematical, economic, scientific and technical fact that the metric system is more widley accepted, and for good reasons?