Sometimes, it’s tough to get across just how big something is. Measurements are accurate, of course, but sometimes people use the wrong units to describe things:
And even when we use the right ones, it’s sometimes difficult for the average layperson to mentally comprehend what 50m or 5km is. That’s why we often choose to rely on common everyday things to describe the size of an object. In the UK, that common everyday thing would be a double-decker bus. Fairly standard, nationally ubiquitous: a good choice to let us know how big a fatberg in the local sewer is:
But that’s the UK. So maybe we need to look at something else for places that don’t have double decker buses. Like an animal. The elephant seems a fairly good choice, even though they do vary a bit in size:
But in Israel, they don’t have double decker buses or elephants. So those wouldn’t work as examples. They do… they do seem to have an intimate knowledge of the scale of… er… capybaras, though:
That’s a big asteroid, and those are some chunky 1.2m capybaras. Equivalent to 1,700 Nine-banded armadillos or 6,200 carrots. The same size as 112 Fatbergs. Huge.
Thankfully, as the blurb points out, the KiloCapybara lump of rock isn’t going hit us. This time. But we must always be on the lookout for multi-rodent sized bits of space debris about to crash into our planet, and describe their size accurately: whatever it takes