this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
468 points (95.7% liked)
memes
10447 readers
3427 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While I agree, most people know tera- at this point. Most people probably do not know zetta- yet.
Most of us aren't used to "terrawatts" though. Is that like one Earth worth of watts? One watt as measured on Earth? The definition of watt culturally accepted by Earthlings?
You wouldn't find a terawatt in everyday usage, but a terawatt-hour is pretty commonplace when talking about the energy usage of entire populations.
This Reuters article states US power demand will climb to "4,027 billion kWh in 2022." Yeah, just say 4 PWh. Or even 4,027 TWh. It's a little more easily digested.
It's already an incomprehensably high number. No matter which way you state it is going to fly over peoples heads.
And the entire electricity consumption of the planet is something like 25.5 petawatt-houts.
They say it like that because people are used to being billed in kWh so it gives them a reference.
I think theperson you're replying to was making a joke off the misspelling of "terrawatts" in OP.
Oh that's super interesting and I did not know that, but I was riffing off the double R in "terrawatt," instead of "terawatt."
Like "tera" describes an order of magnitude, but "terra" means "earth," as in "terra firma," "terra nova," or "terran."
So I guess you could say that 25.5 petawatt-hours = 25,500 terawatt-hours = 1 terrawatt-hour.
And how're we supposed to learn when y'all keep dumbing shit down?