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The Metric System Is Here To Stay

"'Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next."
"Never heard of 'em," said the barman shortly. "Litre and half litre—that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you."

—Nineteen Eighty Four

Although fiction set in the present-day United States tends to use imperial units, fiction set in the future is more likely to instead use the metric system. This may be because it makes things seem more futuristic: scientists use SI units (which is based on the metric system), and - given that most other countries, except Myanmar and Liberia, officially use the metric system - it may be only a matter of time until the United States also changes to metric. As it is, its military uses it if only to stay in sync with its allies.

While futuristic science fiction embraces this trope, futuristic fantasy often averts it: imperial measurements seem more appropriate for a non-scientific milieu.

The metric system is at least for scientific applications superior to the imperial system — absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, occurs at 0 Kelvin^note, and most quantities of interest in thermodynamics — say, the power radiated by a light bulb — depend on a simple way on its temperature in Kelvin — but not Fahrenheit or Celsius. And there are exactly 1000 meters in a kilometer, and exactly 1000 millimeters in a meter. Thus, it's not surprising that the United States actually does use the metric system already, in military and scientific endeavors, as well as on pharmaceuticals and nutritional information. (For example, soft drinks commonly come in 2- or 3-liter bottles.) In fact, the United States' measurements (not imperial - that would be British, and there are differences, e.g. 1 imperial gallon equals 1.20095 U.S. liquid gallons) are defined in metric units in relevant legislation. Further details can be found on That Other Wiki

Just to note, the United States is one of only three countries, along with Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia, that have not adopted the SI (metric) as their official system. So it is generally considered only a matter of time.

Overlaps with Unit Confusion.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

While Mobile Suit Gundam and its numerous spin-offs list all the Humongous Mecha specifications in metric units, it doesn't really qualify for this trope because the series is made in Japan, where the metric system is widely used. However, the fact that few (if any) American translations bother to convert them is probably due to this trope.

Film

Used as a joke in Zenon: Girl Of The Twenty First Century. Zenon is from a space station, but when she arrives on Earth, she explodes a test tube because she was thinking in Celsius when all the instructions were in Fahrenheit. In a science class.
Avatar, naturally. ("Klick" is military slang for kilometer, in case you were wondering.)
- Also normal person slang in Canada.
Star Wars (though "inch" does appear occasionally in the Expanded Universe).
- Technically, it's set in the distant past, but it is futuristic.

Literature

Inverted by Scottish author Ken Mac Leod's Fall Revolution books. When asked why spacecraft use imperial measures, Ellie May Ngwethru replies, "Fucking NASA." (Which is wrong; the reason the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed was that NASA and JPL were using metric but Lockheed-Martin was using imperial, and didn't check the measurements.)
Honor Harrington is thoroughly metric (even the Deep South of Grayson), to the point that Honor, while reading Oliver Twist in her spare time, wondered what those "inches" and "pounds" mean and how much would it be. Subverted when the Grayson pasttime of baseball is introduced in the books. Despite using metric for everything else, the Graysons stubbornly insist on using American measurements for baseball, because if they attempted to use metric, they'd either end up with crufty measurements (keeping the field the right dimensions) or end up with a field that was slightly off in distances. They refuse to update the game to include modern measurements because baseball is Serious Business.
David Drake's RCN has Cinnabar use the imperial system while their enemies the Alliance (not The Alliance) use metric — but Drake says, in the foreword for the first few books, that's just Translation Convention because he believes that after more than a thousand years, humanity will have scrapped both systems in favor of something else.
As seen in the page quote, in British speculative fiction using the metric system in the future is usually a hint of dystopia. Oddly this is a much more common use than in American fiction, perhaps because the metric system has never been (in parts) imposed by government in America.
Depending on the specific setting, Larry Niven apparently has no problem with either averting this trope or playing it straight. Ringworld is an example of the former, while The Integral Trees is an example of the latter.
Uglies uses this, to the extent that another system of measurement isn't even mentioned.
Warhammer 40000 novels use metric (but the game mechanics use imperial).
David Foster Wallace had a personal liking for metric (it seems), so in many of his works (including Infinite Jest), metric units prevail if he can help it.
There's a curious semi-inversion in the short-lived series of English translations of the Perry Rhodan novels. Because the originals are in German distances are given in metric, but translator Wendayne Ackerman consistently renders meters into yards - not even bothering to multiply by three to get feet.

Live Action TV

Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the follow-on serieses Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, consistently use the metric system, to the point of changing the scriptwriter's wording if necessary. This caused a scientific error at least once: During the production of the ST:TNG episode "The Royale", they "converted" a temperature to Celsius (presumably to make it more "futurey") by simply swapping the unit names. The original temperature was -291 �F (-179.4 �C), but the lowest possible temperature (absolute zero) is -273.15 �C... whoops.
Star Trek: The Original Series and its movies were known for using both the metric and imperial systems, sometimes in the same sentence, in a faintly baffling manner... much like the modern scientific community and US military.
- The novelisation for Star Trek IV featured Scotty having to mentally translate from metric to US customary when talking to the factory owner.
On Babylon 5, the eponymous station is consistently described as "five miles long". This is, however, the only measurement on the show that does not use the metric system.
Terra Nova. Justified in that there are people from several different countries in the settlement.

Tabletop Games

Traveller.
Champions. As of 6th Edition, all distances are in meters or kilometers. (Previous editions used "inches" as a unit of distance and "hexes" as a unit of area; these were game scale units, both of which were two meters across.)
Inverted in Steve Jackson Games' GURPS, which — despite the "Generic Universal" part of its name — has firmly stuck with the imperial system for the past twenty years, even when offering a licensed conversion of the Traveller system.
- Apparently so much of the player base is American that they can't afford to switch to metric because, like many small RPG makers, SJGames is a margin business. (The Basic Set book does have a metric conversion table near the front.)
- Also averted in Car Wars. Miles, feet, and pounds abound in Autoduel America.
Older versions of RuneQuest used metric for measurements.
Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 both used metres for ranges and kilogrammes for encumberance purposes.
The 3rd edition rules for Star Wars d20 used metres, when literally all other games based on the d20 system were based on the imperial system.
Like the rest of its parent franchise, the Serenity RPG averts the trope, and more overtly than its predecessors. Speed is given in feet and miles, and warheads are measured in pounds, to name a few examples.

Video Games

F-Zero and Wipeout measure (ridiculously high) speed in kilometers per hour.
Halo. Mostly brought up in its Expanded Universe.
- Whenever a waypoint was placed on your HUD, it always measures distance in either metres or kilometres.^note
The X-Universe series measures almost everything in metric. The only aversion is in time, for which the game uses Teladi-derived Standard Time Units (and as of X3: Terran Conflict, this has been scrapped for player convenience).

Webcomics

Afterlife Blues. "You didn't recognise the Hero of Athens when you were two meters away from her?"
Escape From Terra, in addition the Martian calendar and system of time measurement is decimalized (1 Martian day = 100 centimes).
Freefall often has the characters using metric units with the Imperial equivalents in footnotes.
The (essentially) culturally American society shown in Schlock Mercenary uses the metric system, even among civilians... but every now and then the (American) author forgets himself.

Web Original

Civil Protection implies that Earth's gone metric post-Combine-takeover when Mike gives directions in "Shadow of a Doubt":
Mike: Alright, what you want to do here is take a right at the end of this road, and stay on it for about a mile. I mean, a kilometer or two.

Real Life

For some peculiar reason, British road signs still give distances in miles despite the fact that the metric system has been taught exclusively in schools since at least the early 1990s. Retailers exclusively use the metric system for all foodstuffs apart from beer and milk, which are defined in both systems.
- The usual cited reason for not changing is the sheer expense of changing pretty much every roadsign in the land that has a number on it. Every distance sign and speed sign would need to be replaced, which would be a colossal undertaking for little practical benefit — not to mention that whatever they may have learned in school, pretty much everyone uses miles, feet and inches in everyday conversation.
- Australia, with a colossally larger land mass, made the switch from Imperial to Metric road signs starting on the 1st of July 1974. A new metric sign was erected along side each old sign and a large public education campaign took place. The old signs were gradually removed over the course of a month. In a country consisting to 90% of deserts.
- Canada officially adopted metric in 1977, but its adoption by the general public has been hit and miss - for instance, many people use Celsius for outdoor temperature but Fahrenheit for indoor and/or body temperature, or measure long distances in kilometres but short and medium distances in inches and feet... unlike Brits who are more likely to use centimetres and metres for short and medium distances, but miles for longer distances.
  - Rural Canadians living in the prairies often use miles, simply because the grid roads are a mile distant, so measuring out three miles on an unmarked road is easy - three major cross roads, and you're there.
During The Eighties, a conclusive switch to the metric system was widely anticipated in the United States. Obviously, that didn't happen, but at the time the expectation was so prevalent that the newly-finished Interstate 19 put up signs with distances in kilometers. The program ran from 1975 to 1982, and it's worth noting that its failure was not necessarily because Americans disliked the metric system. Public opinion tended to be split or just ambivalent, so the Reagan administration couldn't justify the cost of overseeing and marketing the metrication effort, educating manufacturers, and changing highway signs. Several of the aforementioned metric road signs still stand today, particularly near the Canadian and Mexican borders.
- The metric system did take hold in manufacturing, as companies wanted to build things that could be easily repaired overseas, hence Vanilla Ice singing about his "Five Oh"^noteA Ford Mustang with a 5.0l V8 and not his "three oh two."
- The expected switch to metric provided a lot of fodder for the Peanuts strip during this time, as seen here◊. The 1973 TV special There's No Time for Love, Charlie Brown has a Hilarious in Hindsight moment when Peppermint Patty says that, "We're going to have to learn the metric system, Franklin. By the time we grow up, the metric system will probably be official."
  - Maybe by the time they grow up, it will be!
September 23, 1999: NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used imperial units for a key spacecraft operation. The software keeping track of the small forces reported by the spacecraft's accelerometer gave results in pound-seconds of impulse, while the software that used this data to compute the spacecraft's course expected impulses in newton-seconds. The craft descended too low into the Martian atmosphere and was destroyed by atmospheric stresses and friction.
The US uses SI units for some things because no equivalent "traditional" units exist. For example, all electrical units are SI — watts, kilowatts,^note amperes, etc. The units of volume for sound (the bel and the more commonly used decibel) are SI as well.
When the metric system was introduced in the United Kingdom, Punch did a satire which was purportedly a government information pamphlet that accompanied the switch from "Biblical" measures to Imperial (how many cubits in a yard?). Which was quite funny considering that there were people who wrote complex theories trying to justify the Imperial system, which differs quite significantly from the weights and measures used in the Bible, on religious grounds, demanding that it should be maintained against the "godless" Metric system.