Comment on Fictional
marcos@lemmy.world 1 month agoYou are correctly trying to say it’s well defined, but you are complaining about the wrong comment. You should check the meaning of “arbitrary” again.
Anyway, it’s not entirely arbitrary because it was created to represent a “round” fraction of the Earth’s circumference that is similar to the length of a person’s arms. But it deviated from that too, so it’s subjective how much that counts.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 month ago
Why use a ratio of the length of the Earth? Why not the Moon? Or the Sun? Or Mars?
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Because people weren’t traveling around the moon, mars, or the sun back then, they were traveling around the earth :V
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Ah, so it is arbitrarily human experience that defines these things, I see.
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Yeah, in history we’ve really been ignoring the experiences of the sunwalkers, but thankfully society is leaving those prejudices in the past now.
It’s all arbitrary one way or another, but the meter was (seemingly) chosen for a specific purpose, creating a unit based on a good and verifiable frame of reference (though probably not as absolute as people thought back then), while also having 1 meter be a convenient and useful measure on a human scale.