# Why isn't there metric time? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 22, 2005, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191 "2005-11-22T02:27:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Stealth\_Potato](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Stealth\_Potato](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stealth_Potato)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/21 "2005-11-22T19:44:54Z")
> [@Mr2001](#): > > It seems like a bit of a copout to use the “regular” second for metric measurements, though. It’s an arbitrary length of time that isn’t related to any other metric unit, whereas the meter is derived from the circumference of the Earth, and the units for area, volume, and mass are based on the meter. The metric second should be something like the period of a 1-meter pendulum, or the length of time it takes for a dropped object to fall 1 meter. Not quite. The meter is actually now defined as the distance that light travels in… you guessed it, a particular fraction of a second. 1/299,792,458 of a second, to be precise. The second we all know and love is pretty firmly engrained in the metric system now. ---
**Author:** ![sundog66](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee7513/32.png) [@sundog66](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sundog66)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/22 "2005-11-22T20:47:48Z")
This immediately reminded me of the Simpsons episode “They Saved Lisa’s Brain”, in which a group of intellectuals takes over the city: > [@](#): > > LISA: “Principal Skinner, how’s your transportation project coming?” > > SKINNER: “Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they’re running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it’s the dawn of a new enlightenment.” > [@Southessex](#): > > This is officially the _stupidest_ idea I’ve ever heard. And what’s the unofficially stupidest? ---
**Author:** ![Stringer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Stringer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stringer)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/23 "2005-11-22T21:25:21Z")
> [@sundog66](#): > > And what’s the unofficially stupidest? Let’s get involved in a land war in Asia! ---
**Author:** ![Bill\_The\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ba8739/32.png) [@Bill\_The\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_The_Cat)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/24 "2005-11-22T21:37:06Z")
> [@micahjn](#): > > Let’s get involved in a land war in Asia! But what if he’s a Sicilian and death is on the line? ---
**Author:** ![Thirty-Nine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f0a364/32.png) [@Thirty-Nine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thirty-Nine)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/25 "2005-11-22T21:44:57Z")
I brought a Swatch ‘beat’ watch a few years back and tried living on metric time for a while. I made sure to switch by drawing up a list of reference points and periods, and never trying to convert between systems. The big problem was regular tram times, since they didn’t convert into anything that was easy to remember. Otherwise, there wasn’t really any difference. I can’t say I did many on-the-fly calculations that made me glad I was using metric time. I think that’s the fundamental problem: it’s a huge effort (I assume that we use time more than any other unit) to make for virtually no gain. My only issue with the system of time we currently have is that there are five times too many minutes (and seconds). Who arranges to meet at 32 minutes past 7? Of course, it’s not a big deal now we’ve all got used to it. Plus, it could be a lot worse. At least 10 divides sixty. > [@Squink](#): > > Of course, in an ideal world we’d all switch to base 30 (2 X 3 X 5). The additional prime factor would provide us more arithmetical tricks to ease multiplication and division. 30 hour days might be a drag though. 30? What about quarters? That’d be the first thing I’d fix about base 10! Rather than primes, I think it’s more important to find a number that is divisible by the lowest counting numbers. There doesn’t seem to be much need to divide things into fifths, so 12 would seem adequate. Alternatively, a power of 2 like 16 or 8 allows you to keep halving while generating numbers in a memorable pattern. (e.g. 10, 8, 4, 2, 1, 0.8, 0.4, 0.2, 0.1, 0.08, etc) ---
**Author:** ![Eurograff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/df705f/32.png) [@Eurograff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eurograff)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/26 "2005-11-22T21:49:06Z")
> [@Freddy the Pig](#): > > The problem with time, and the reason it resisted decimalization, is that nature saddled us with two incompatible standard units–the day and the year. > > The day measures the cycle of daytime and dark, and the year measures the cycle of the seasons. We can’t live without either one. Long periods of time are going to be measured in years, and shorter periods in days. If I told you something was going to happen a kiloday from now, your first thought would be, “What time of year will that be?” > > No doubt, we could decimalize the intermediate units. There’s no reason why hours, minutes, and seconds _couldn’t_ be decimal fractions of a day. But even if you do that, you’re stuck with the year for longer time scales–unlike the situation with respect to distance, where atomic to astronomical distances can all be measured in meters. > > Another factor is that the day and year are universal, so there was less local variation in Eighteenth Century time measures than in distance measures–and less pressure for a new standard unit. > > So for distance and mass, you could collapse a series of non-standard local measures into a new universal measure on one standard scale. For time, you’d be collapsing what was already a relatively universal measure into a new measure on _two_ standard scales (the day and the year). The benefits of the latter were, and are, less compelling. These are precisely the reasons why decimal time never worked while all the other decimal metric units did, and do. Metric system brought a single set of simple units with easy-to-use conversions into Europe which had had dozens of different units with little or no relation to each other, and which might have had different values in each town. Harmonizing the length and mass units in this logical way was an enormous improvement. But no such improvement was possible in time measurement, since not only Europe but practically every culture in the then-known world used the same set of day, year, and derived units. Even a small reform to this system is probably doomed as long as our species lives on planet Earth where these two measures are crucial to life. Of course what follows is, like any sci-fi author worth their salt has already figured out, that if the human beings are to leave planet Earth some day on the distant future, those same day and year that are so important for us will become entirely meaningless. Clinging to these units and their derivations would probably soon lose popularity as a completely decimal system of kilo- and megaseconds takes the stage. Trying to still follow the old units would be hopelessly _terracentric_. The base unit would obviously be the SI defined second, and nothing prevents those hypothetical space travellers inventing colloquial names for the bigger units: think kilosecond of 16min 40s as a _metric quarter_; megasecond of over 11 days as _metric week_; and gigasecond somewhere between 31 and 32 years as _metric generation_ (or decade or century or whatever). The Earth year does not have any particular importance to human physiology, it’s safe to drop it out. Day does have as we have our sleeping patterns: fortunately one hundred kiloseconds is under 28 hours and thus fits nicely, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture someone naming 100k seconds as _metric day_. The benefits this completely decimalised system gives to our spacefarers are best illustrated when such civilization founds colonies on multiple planets, moons, comets, gigantic space lizards and other things. As each of these things has different rotation speed and distance of their respective suns, the days and years of these colonies would vary wildly. And while a single colony would probably use their own units of time in internal affairs, the interplanetary communication would have to use the metric time. Similarly, life on Earth would still be using their _Earth customary units_, but at the same time recognize the existence of decimal time, and apply it when necessary. ---
**Author:** ![Thirty-Nine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f0a364/32.png) [@Thirty-Nine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thirty-Nine)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/27 "2005-11-22T21:53:03Z")
Ugh… ‘brought’. \ Anyway, while I’m desperately trying to convince people that I can spell, I should elaborate on my mention of S Swatch do produce ‘metric’ watches, which are more of a [dot.com](http://dot.com) throwback than anything else. They divide the day into a thousand ‘beats’, which are slightly longer than our minutes. They refer to their system as ‘internet time’, and decided that they would also do away with pesky time zones - the zero ‘beat’ is midnight in… wait for it… Switzerland. I doubt they had any serious goals of chrono-revolution, but I did see a few swatch metric clocks at ski resorts (but never without a normal clock) ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/28 "2005-11-23T03:10:22Z")
> [@Thirty-Nine](#): > > the zero ‘beat’ is midnight in… wait for it… Switzerland. [Zapp] How very… neutral of them.[/Zapp] ---
**Author:** ![Diceman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Diceman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diceman)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191/29 "2005-11-23T03:18:49Z")
The Star Wars novels use terms like “local night” and “local noon” when the characters are on a planet somewhere and the time of day becomes relevant. There’s also some sort of standard Imperial time unit, which I think is the length of a day on Coruscant. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-isnt-there-metric-time/332191.md?page=1)