this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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Nature doesn't care about anything. It is not a conscious thing. The size of the Earth, however, is a natural phenomenon, just like the speed of light. It just isn't a universal constant, relatively unchanging though it may be.
A multiplier is obviously going to be necessary whatever the base measure, because there's no universal constant that happens to be of a useful, human scale. Or I guess you could use something like the wavelength of the hydrogen line -- about 21.1 cm, a fairly useful length -- but that isn't really inherently a special wavelength, it just happens to be useful in radio astronomy.
The specific chosen points to measure are not natural. The size of the earth is relative to where you pick those points. Sure, it is natural that those two points exist, but choosing them isn't. Any two points any the universe exist naturally. Picking two points to measure is not.
Yeah, to make it useful to humans it needs a scaler. No one is saying that isn't true. That doesn't make it any less arbitrary.