If humans one day conquer all of our solar system we might have settlements not just on Mars and Earth, but also in orbit of Venus or Mercury, and on the moons of the gas planets, like Jupiter’s Europa. Each of those has a different length of day and year.
How would an interplanetary civilization find a common date and time system?
I assume each planet gets it’s own local time, but I think a common date-time system would be usefull.
Also I don’t like to just say, earth is human kinds origin, so it’s time is the standard. Feels lazy.
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Humanity didn’t need to develop time zones until the widespread use of railroads forced the issue. Until then, each city and town had its own time and its relation to the time at the Prime Meridian was only important for determining longitude. Europe was a patchwork of different calendar systems after the Gregorian calendar was established because it was too Catholic, let alone other civilizations keeping their own calendar systems as Europe hadn’t taken over the world yet.
My guess is that it will all be dependent on the second. My guess is that the second becomes standard to humanity as it is baked into so much technology that it can’t be replaced with something else. Every other planet will have the second and design their own timekeeping around that. If a standard is needed across planets, they would probably either use Earth UTC or a way of displaying Unix Time directly in a form which people can directly read.
If we are going to present Unix Epoch in a reasonable manner, do the following:
YYY/MM/DD HH:SSS
SSS is seconds from 000 to A23 (only use of alphanumeric). This gives you an amount where the next unit of “hours” is 210 seconds, or ~0.28 hours.
HH is “hours” from 0 to 63. This gives you an amount where the next unit of “days” is 216 seconds, or ~0.76 days.
DD is “days” from 1 to 32. This gives you an amount where the next unit of “months” is 221 seconds, or ~0.81 months.
MM is “months” from 1 to 16. This gives you an amount where the next unit of “years” is 225 seconds, or ~1.06 years.
YYY is “years” starting from Year 0 in Unix Epoch Time.
Expect that few people actually keep time this way unless they are forced to. Likely, the only people doing so are militaries that routinely have to coordinate with other militaries where a dominant time can’t be agreed upon.
There could be an adjustment with the binary hours and binary days to get binary days close to terran days since a binary day is only ~18.2 hours long and that could be an issue with running a ship.
@HobbitFoot @econsa
Once you are working over distances where the speed of light starts to really matter, there is no “Earth UTC”, no “what time is it right now on Earth?” because there is no “right now” that isn’t right here.But yeah, the second of relative time is an SI unit with a physical definition now; that’s staying.
Common presentation of time doesn’t really help if the datum isn’t set in some way. I can present today as 1448/03/23 since today is 22 Rabi’ al-Awwal 1448 AH. The presentation of YYYY/MM/DD is kept standard, but it uses a different calendar with a different year zero and a different year length.
If two places can’t standardize time, why should they strive to present it uniformly? Also, it makes recording how time is kept important to the time’s recording as you’ve now brought in the wrinkle of how to handle relativistic time.
You could use a galactic year (the time the sun takes to orbit the Milky Way) as a base—roughly 225 million earth years. So a nano-galactic-year (nano-galanno?) would be about 82 earth days, which seems reasonable.
I have one based on universal constants (and base 12) for my conworld that starts off in a generation ship unrelated to any planet
If you scroll down to the bottom with “Units” you’ll see what I mean
