Here’s something I think we all need to sit down and think about before doing other stuff of small importance: Assuming that someday we will in fact inhabit other planets such as Mars, and assuming there will be male and female inhabitants, how would one classify the age of a baby born on this planet. Obviously days or years can get pretty out of whack with a completely different orbit, so for practical purposes, how will we determine age, or even time for that matter??
I imagine that for purposes of records they’d simply use earth as a standard. They’d probably come up with something called earth standard time.
Marc
Well I don’t see how you can use earth as a standard, since 24 hours does not equal one day on a planet with different paths of orbit. Say hypothetically that a planet had 30 hours in one complete cycle from day to night. Earth time would not work because the times would not correspond with daytime/nighttime but once every 4 days. It would be very impractical for any communications with earth or other planets.
These questions are addressed in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Good books.
How about a universal time? Something that is not based on the rotation of a planet?
Captains Log, Stardate 41,567.4?
If my calculations are correct, October 7, 2001 5:26 pm to October 8, 2001 3:38 am will be my first birthday…
…using Saturn time.
I’m gonna have a rager. You’re all invited.
Today is my 118th birthday on Mercury.
Even cooler than that, because the day on Mercury is over 58 Earth days long, it will continue to be my 118th birthday until November 20th 6:38am.
If you thought it didn’t get any cooler than that, you were wrong. Because a year on Mercury is only around 88 days long, I’ll turn 119 on December 19th of this year, and it will be my birthday for 58 more Earth days. (That is if anyone still uses “Earth days” to measure time.)
I’m not familiar with K. S. Robinson, but my WAG is, the colonizers would initially try to keep the old Earth reckoning, but soon would switch to Martian years. It would be kind of like metric vs. imperial (i.e., normal) systems of weight, each planet content with its own method.
Was that Robinson’s idea?
They would have two different age standards: One for a martian age, and one for an earth age.
There would be a simple conversion factor involved, if a mars inhabitant were to replocate to the earth and vice-versa.
A person who was X Mars years old would be Y earth years old.
It would appear to me that every planet with a different orbit/rotation would HAVE to adopt their own standard, since time as we know it is relative to our position in space relative to a big shiny star. I’m content with that I guess
Ill Logik writes:
It is? Darn, and all this (heh, heh) time I had thought that the second had been defined for a third of a second by atomic transitions. Boy, are those guys at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Harvard, and the National Physical Laboratory going to get a surprise when find they find out about this!
quote:
------------------------------------------------------------It is? Darn, and all this (heh, heh) time I had thought that the second had been defined for a third of a second by atomic transitions. Boy, are those guys at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Harvard, and the National Physical Laboratory going to get a surprise when find they find out about this!
I meant “time as we know it” to mean time as people care about it. No one trying to carry on their every day life (be it normal or not) gives a rat’s ass about atomic thirds of seconds. No one says “Oh damn! I’ve only got 1300 atomic transitions to get home or the wife is gonna kill me!” People worry about time relative to the light and dark. Back thousands of years ago, when calendars and such were put into use, do you think they watched atomic transitions or called the U.S. Naval Acadamey to refine them?? Nope. They looked at the…what is that big shiny star called?? Oh yeah, THE SUN!! Thats what I meant.
I always thought we should speed up such colonization just to mess will the people who buy into astrology. A baby born in space, or on a another planet would certainly cause a rethinking of the “science.” I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Eventually, their descendants would have evolved to conform to longer days and lower gravity, to the point where they’d be different species. At that point, comparisons to the ages of Earth humans would be meaningless.
Now, back to work.
And back thousands of years, when people wanted to know how long a thing was, they got the local potentate to stretch out his arm, stretched a string from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his nose, and called it a “yard”. Most of the world is past that, too.
Engineers aren’t going to throw away every reference that they have and redefine a “second” to be 1/3600 of a Martian…oops, make that a Mercurian, day. The second is already well-defined, and that definition is likely to be carried with us everywhere we go.
How will a Martian sabra define his age? Why, he won’t say, “I’m 23 Martian years old”; that will have no meaning to anyone who doesn’t know the period of Mars’ revolution. Instead, he’ll say, “I’m 1.4 gigaseconds old”; that will have meaning everywhere.
Heinlein covered this in Stranger in a Strange Land. Valentine was born on Mars, and an astrologer has to account for that in his chart.
As for time as we know it…
In our world, it bears only a slight resemblance to what the sun’s doing. I’m reminded of that every time I get up in pitch black in the winter and come home in pitch black, and yet stay awake and active for many more hours in the glow of electric lights.
The Martians will likely have a few different timekeeping methods. No big deal. They’ll keep track of Universal Time (it already exists), and probably function on a local day/calendar if their activities are related at all to sunlight or seasonal changes. Of course, If they’re mostly just staying sealed up in submarine-like habitat modules. they can keep whatever hell kind of time they feel like (like sailors on submarines).
Multiple calendars aren’t so strange. Ask the Jews or Muslims or Chinese.
If their black, would they be African-Martians? :D:D
I wonder how they’ll develop physically due to the reduced gravity? Less muscle mass, probably. Different bone lengths? Smaller circulatory system diameters due to less demand?
I hope I’m alive long enough to see it.
The way it’s done will vary based on living conditions. ON the Moon they’ll be living underground with artificial light, so I’m sure they’ll just turn lights in common areas on/off to conform to Earth daylenghts.
On Mars they’ll need protection from UV rays (no ozone layer), but they’ll probably still live on the surface and have windows. The Martian day is 39 minutes longer than hours or 24:39 instead of 24:00.
Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Mars Trilogy, dealt with this by using a “timeslip:” at midnight the clocks stopped, showing “12:00” for thirty-nine minutes like a new VCR, then resumed.
This seems an inelegant solution to me. I like Robert Zubrin’s idea better: make the second slightly longer, or 1.024 Earth seconds. This seems unwieldy, but there’s beauty there when you think about it. The difference is slight enough that an Earth native won’t notice, but it still gives you the 60 seconds/minute, 60 minutes/hour and 24 hours/day we’re used to.
And if you ever need to convert to Earth time, you can divide seconds, minutes or hours all by the same 1.024. You don’t need different values for the different increments.
And for scientific purposes where precision and standards are more important, you can still use ordinary Earth seconds.
Of course you’d still need a scheme for dividing the years into seasons, months and weeks (complicated by Mars’s relatively highly elliptical orbit). I don’t remember how Zubrin handled that, but I don’t think Robinson did that very well either: he simply doubled the number of months, so each year had a March I and March II, April I and April II, etc. Ugh. I’d rather double the length or something like that, it’d be less confusing.