Metric prefixes come in handy for expressing both large and small quantities.
So we have megawatt power systems and gigabyte hard drives on the high end, and we have nanoscale electronics and femtosecond lasers on the low end. Advances in scientific research and technology keep pushing us to new frontiers in the domain of metric prefixes. In the July Scientific American , Philip and Phylis Morrison describe the escalation in the amount of stored knowledge since the days of the famed library in ancient Alexandria. The library probably shelved the equivalent of 50,000 modern books. Counting the literature of China, India, Iraq, and Iran, the total of number of books available at that time might have numbered approximately 100,000.