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.
This immediately reminded me of the Simpsons episode “They Saved Lisa’s Brain”, in which a group of intellectuals takes over the city:
And what’s the unofficially stupidest?
Let’s get involved in a land war in Asia!
But what if he’s a Sicilian and death is on the line?
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.
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)
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.
Ugh… ‘brought’. <Shudders>
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 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)
[Zapp] How very… neutral of them.[/Zapp]
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.