It did it to unify the country, as the two halves were in separate days. It chose the day furthest in the future.
Maybe we need, or will need, some sort of hypermodern space calendar. A work week could be 1 megasecond, let us say, but scheduling day-to-day tasks around an appropriate watch system will be more crucial, especially if days and nights will no longer be relevant.
You just invented stardates.
Vernor Vinge has space-dwelling societies that measure everything in seconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds and gigaseconds. A kilosecond is a little while (16 minutes or so) - you can serve a watch for twenty kiloseconds. You sleep every 90 or 100 kiloseconds or so. What we would call a year is about 30 megaseconds - and a gigasecond is about 30 years. When I’m looking forward to something, I sometimes calculate it that way.
That would never work. Human beings have evolved over millions of years to function in a 24 hour day-night cycle, and a 365 day yearly cycle. You can’t change that arbitrarily and expect people to thrive.
Not sure it has to be exactly 24 hours. I would bet most people could deal with, say, 28 hours if they had to. It’s been tried, anyway. Either way, this is cold, hard space with searing heat, freezing cold, deadly radiation and utter void; you are not on your cozy little rock any more, and any non-hackers had better adapt quickly or else learn the hard way about the unforgiving universe.
The circadian rhythm is about 90 kiloseconds (25 hours) (when people are isolated from all time cues (living underground), they adopt a cycle naturally of about 25 hours (with variations from 24 - 27).
It’s been tried with the result that it doesn’t work.
(Set back an hour because the cycle was previously thought to be 25 hours, now found to be just over 24 hours.)
“The 28-hour cycle distributed light exposure, sleep and wakefulness, work and play evenly around the biological clock,” explains Czeisler. “The men and women did not get light exposure at the same time each clock day. Instead, they experienced a six-day week in which light and dark occurred at different times each day.”
The result was clear. No matter when the subjects went to bed or got up, and whatever they did while awake, body temperature and hormones rose and fell on an average cycle of 24 hours and 11 minutes.
Result: Steady decline in PVT (Psychomotor Vigilance Task) performance over the 6 week period.
Assuming that those results aren’t overtaken by another study in the future, we have a circadian rhythm of 88 kiloseconds. Not very different than 90 kiloseconds.
Meant to add - people have done all sorts of crazy sleep/wake cycles for months at a time - like the US submarine navy’s 18 hours days: 6 hours on watch, 12 hours off, for months at a time (thankfully, they’re getting away from that, but it shows that people can survive on a sleep cycle significantly different than 24 hours).
Once I took a ship to Europe. The ship adopted a 25 hour day for the first five days to make up for the time difference. I found it very hard to adapt and would have preferred just one 29 hour day, the way you do when you fly.
Just curious: Exactly what was the difficulty? Was it annoying to adjust your wristwatch every morning for 5 days straight? Or did you feel biologically out-of-whack?
You seem to have confused the unit of measurement with the duration being measured.
We can certainly have durations equal to traditional hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades denominated in seconds.
Our current units are hardly a paragon of logic, naturalness, nor convenience, being groups of 60, 60, 24, 7, 4-point-something, 12, and 10 of the next smaller unit.
Greenwyvern is responding to the other part of what I wrote
and arguing that such a sleep pattern would be unworkable. GreenWyvern correctly notes that experiments have found a 24 hour, 11 minute cycle in human physiology that persists even when no time cues exist, and that a 28 hour cycle degrades mental performance. However, I think that the long-term experiments showing people doing well for months at a time on a 25-hour cycle (with self-imposed light cuing) means that the 24 hour 11 minute physiological cycle can be successfully overridden. At any rate, I don’t think Vinge is specific about the time schedule - people say “about 90 kiloseconds” for a watch-schedule - they might easily be talking about 24 hours.