Ronna learn some new metric prefixes? They’re just an upgrade • businessroundups.org

We may still not need to worry about how many yottabytes your computer can hold, but the international standards community has added two new prefixes for even greater numbers than that – ronna for 10²⁷ and quetta for 10³⁰.

Last week at a conference in Paris, representatives from numerous governments came together to vote on the official names for these huge magnitude indicators. The last time they did this was in 1991, when the now-familiar zetta and yotta were added, as well as zepto and yocto for their respective negative powers of 10.

As you may have guessed, we now also have terms for 10^-27 and 10^-30: ronto and quecto.

While there are few things that cannot be adequately described in terms of the existing prefixes, it is quite nice to have some units for some well-known scales. For example, as nature dictates, The mass of the Earth is about a ronnogram and the mass of an electron is about a quectogram. Handy if you are weighing them in the kitchen.

More importantly, this gives a little bit of room to grow for data science, where we’re already talking about “exascale” computing and zettabytes of data — in fact, as a planet, we’re expected to grow a lot over time produce yottabyte per year. 2030s, unless some blessed intervention takes place. What is next?

If you asked a week ago, the answer might be “hellabytes” and then “brontobytes,” which are actually great terms, but, as Richard Brown, the British metrologist who suggested the prefixes warned for Nature, “completely unofficial” . Unfortunately, the prefixes also conflict with existing abbreviations, and probably no one in Southern California would approve of using “hella” in an official context.

“It’s not so much that I wanted to be a bummer, though that’s part of it,” said Brown—to the victor, the loot and all, but you don’t have to rub it in, Richard. In any case, the conference cited “the importance of timely action to prevent the de facto adoption of unofficial prefix names in other communities” as one of the reasons for adopting the new one.

Ronna and quetta came about after years of discussion and elimination of alternatives. It may seem strange that the new term is so close to ‘rona’, something we’d rather not be reminded of, but we can be reassured by the fact that we probably won’t be needing the term for years to come and hopefully the pandemic will be a distant memory by then (and, let’s hope, not because it was overshadowed by a worse one).