Hey, Karen, haven’t seen you on the board in a while! I’m surprised that you didn’t mention Mars, likely to be home to our first colony on another planet. The Martian day is just slightly longer than Earth’s, as a matter of fact-- About 24 and a half hours. Locals would almost certainly use local time, since it’d be most convenient, but it wouldn’t match Earth’s. One suggestion I’ve seen, by David Weber in the Honor Harrington series of sci-fi books (I highly reccommend, btw: First book is On Basilisk Station) is that you divide the local day into however many “standard” hours it takes, and then have an extra nonstandard hour tacked on at the end, so Mars, for instance, would have 24 hours of 60 minutes each, and then one hour of 36 (or whatever… Textbooks at office) minutes. Needless to say, this plan generally involved using computers for conversions…
The two definitions are very close, and neither are very good–which is why they ended up with a reference bar. The first definition is why the acceleration due to gravity is so close to pi squared. Another reason why they went with the second is so they could request a large grant to perform a scientific measurement.
Now, the speed of light defines the meter, so that the speed of light is exactly 299792458 meters per second and always will be as long as it does. Here’s an easy mnemonic to remember this important constant: “An ingenious astronomy student remembers an easy light mnemonic.” (number of letters in each word = digit)
So on Mars, would the duty shifts be 8 hrs and 12 minutes long? Or would you have 36 minutes per day without police and fire protection (etc)?
If people were born on Mars, how many years old would they say they are? In what year would they begin kindergarten? Would they still have summer vacations with no school? How long would it be for professors to get tenure? What would be the age of majority? What about prison sentences?
Yeesh! It’s enough to make you fear colonizing other planets.
When I worked at the Post Office 20 years ago, hours were divided into 100 36-second units on the time clock.
Hmm… I do recall one Heinlein book (Podkayne of Mars), where the main character/narrator introduces herself as being nine years old, old enough that she should be getting married by now. Had to do a double-take on that one, even Heinlein isn’t usually that liberal…
I would guess that other planets would either use an official “standard time” matched to Earth to determine things like age of majority, tenure, etc., or they’d convert such things to the closest round number in the local calender. Humans have dealt with multiple calenders before; for instance, the official Muslim calender is based on a year being exactly twelve lunar months, so Islamic observances migrate through the solar year: A Muslim needs to keep track of both the religious calender to know when to feast and when to fast, and the standard solar calender for secular purposes. I don’t suppose that using a separate Martian calender and Earth calender for various purposes would be much more difficult.
A lot would depend on whether or not the time for a planet to revolve around the sun matters. The idea of a “year” is more closely tied to the seasons, and if there are no seasons, then there is less reason to care about the year. Even if something like seasons do matter, they may be only of interest to persons immediately affected (like those who work on the surface) who refer to their equivalent of “tide tables” to know when it’s the proper timing.
Since the human biological rhythm is tied to the “day” of approximately 24hrs, then that time unit would probably survive, with milestones being measured in some multiple of one hundred or one thousand days. For example-- Adulthood when a person is 6500 days old, bar-mitzvah at 4500, retirement at 25,000, eligible for public office at 10,000, etc.
(Posted on Day 717 of Kiloday 2451)
which they calculated wrong, but since everyone was using it by then, decided to stick with it…
marketing, gotta love it.
Fi.
New year’s eve is just the last day of the year, literally. What’s the problem? Since you are still having years, rather than measuring in, say eons, you will always have a last day.
Actually, if you keep a human in an area where they have no idea what the time is, and can’t see outside (like in a fallout shelter) they will have an approximately 25 hour cycle, which will, after a week or so, have no corelation to the “day” we live by.
If you had the 13 28-day months, you could use the leftover day for recovery from New Year’s eve (extra big party every four years). Then you start each year on a Sunday.
Here’s the scary part: Every month would have a Friday the 13th. Augh!
One advantage is everyone would know what days the phases of the moon fell on. They’d be almost synched with the months, and would only precess slowly.
If that is your goal, then I suggest you check out the Hebrew or Islamic calendars, which do a much better job of staying in sync with the moon. A 28 day month calendar will be of by about 10-11 days every year. (The Islamic calendar year is 354 or 355 days long).
If I remember those studies correctly, the problem is that the subjects were not allowed any clocks, or external stimuli. They slept when they were tired and awoke when they weren’t, and that was used to set the “day”.
And while they may have decoupled from the normal 24hr day, and on occasions stayed awake or asleep for unusually long times, in general they settled down to patterns of behavior which correlated to a standard “day,” even though that day was rarely exactly 24 hours, or even the same duration as the previous “day”. But statistically, the mean was a bit longer than 24hrs, and the standard deviations were fairly small.
Have there been any similar studies which tried to force the subjects to stay in sync with a day of 23 or 25 or 30 or some other number of hours? Seems like there should be some animal studies, but I haven’t heard of any.
Since we’ve segued into calendar reform, one of the more practical suggestions is to retain the idea of 12 months and seven day weeks, with the year split into 4 quarters of 30, 30 and 31 day months. You then have a leftover day or two leftover days in leap years, which you tack on somewhere and give special names to, not counting them as a day of the week or belonging to any month. As a result, you have a given calendar date landing on the same day every year - in fact the quarters work out evenly in terms of weekdays.
One variant of this is the “World Calendar”:
http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/calendar-reform.html
Many proposals hinge on the fact that if you special case 1 day (2 on leap years) you wind up with 364 days, which factors much more nicely. BTW, the World Calendar has 4 Fri 13’s - one each quarter.
Another good calendar reference (there’s a link on the page above) is: