Mars is 225 Gigameters Away

Why don’t we use Gigameters and Megameters?  Leaving aside that here in America we use miles, like a bunch of morons, why don’t prefixes continue past kilometers for regular use?

People are measured in meters or centimeters. Smaller things that humans can still perceive go down to millimeters. Things we can’t see go down even smaller .

Distances between bigger things are meters.  Between land marks are kilometers. But big distances, such as New York to London across the Atlantic (~5500 km) could be reduced to 5.5 megameters. Hell, we use megabytes and gigabytes and now terabytes. So people are familiar with the prefixes.

Planets are always given in kilometers.  But it would make more sense to use gigameters. Mars average distance is only 225 gigameters. Voyager 1 is 18 billion kilometers away from Earth. Or just 18 terameters. Granted, in space they also use lightyears and AU’s (astronomical units). But I think people could relate to variants of meters better.

Anyways, that’s my random thought for the day.