The International system of units is a system of units to help us write down quantities without having to use scientific notation or lots of digits or zeroes. For example, a million Hertz is a megahertz; a billionth of a meter is a nanometer, and a billion meters is a gigameter, which I have almost never heard of; it is 1/4 of the way to the Moon. The international system first invented a system of prefixes that went to 1012 and to 10-18. This proved to be inadequate; for example, we are now talking about thousands of terabytes. So this was extended to 1018, the small units still went only to 10-18. Even this has proven to be inadequate. So the scientific system went two steps farther in each direction. 1021 is zetta-, and 1024 is yotta-. The sun puts out 380 yottawatts of power, says Nearest Star, by Leon Golub and Jay M. Pasachoff, page 12. I can see how these endings were derived. zetta is z + -etta, which is an alteration of septi-, meaning 7, as 21 is 7 groups of three. yotta is y + -otta, an alteration of octo-, meaning 8. The pattern here is that we go backwards from the beginning of the alphabet, starting with z and y, and we follow it up with an alteration of the Greek or Latin for the next number. According to this pattern, the next ending should be xona-, since x comes before y in the alphabet, and 9 is noni- in Latin. I continued in this line going all the way up to 1063 , which was luma-. However, this is still not big enough. A cubic zeptoparsec is about the size of a mite, and a light year is also a unit we deal with, and so is a parsec. However, there are 1063 cubic zeptoparsecs in a cubic parsec, so this is still not far enough
So I have come up with a new system that avoids this problem, by putting place value in the prefixes. We have used a number of languages, such as Latin, Greek and so forth to construct these prefixes, but we haven't used English. So I propose using it to continue beyond yotta- and yocto-, with nina- and ninto, derived from the English "nine", instead of xona- and xonto-. The next unit then is tena- or tento-, meaning 1030 or 10-30After that, then add another prefix to indicate units. One is "kilo", so eleven; i.e., 1033is tenakilo-. So the Sun's mass is 2 tenakilograms, as opposed to 2 vundagrams in the old system. After that comes tenamega-, tenagiga-, ..., tenanina-, and then bitena-. The "bi" comes from the standard chemical element name system. Hence 1090 is tritena-, 1093 is tritenakilo-, and so forth. 10300 is huna-, after English "hundred". Then comes hunakilo-, hunamega-, ... bihuna-, ..bihunapenttenazetta-, which corresponds to 257, and means 10771. 103000 is tousa-, after "thousand". We could continue with this, but this gives enough units to express an enormous range of sizes, hopefully enough for the foreseeable future. 10-15 is tenafemto-; the higher order prefixes are the same for small and large, and the units' syllable tells which it is. The abbreviations, as "G" for "giga", are a little irregular, due to coincidences. This system is so big that it outruns the ability to abbreviate it.
Why way out this far? We talk of bigger and smaller things all the time. For example, a jiffy is 100 tenafemtoseconds, 10-43 second, which some say is the smallest unit of time possible. So here is what I say:
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