I hope maybe I missed this one somewhere in the core book, and this won't open a can of worms on me. How does everyone on the solar system calculate dates and times in a calender year? Do they use their native solar calender based on their habitats (or planets) rotation, or is there one utilitarian calender now that uses a different scheme?
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Solar Calender
Sun, 2011-08-21 22:07
#1
Rada Ion
Solar Calender
Sun, 2011-08-21 23:42
#2
Axel the Chimeric
Re: Solar Calender
This has, indeed, been covered, but in Sunward.
Most habitats use Universal Time, which is basically carrying on the Earth standard time. 24 hour day, set to GMT, since it's usually pretty arbitrary (not much of a day/night cycle on most habs or when you're, say, on Venus, where days last months).
There's exceptions to this, of course, but the only major one is Mars, which uses the Darian Calendar; 669 (sometiems 668) days in a year, split into 24 months. The Martian clock is on AMT, and runs up to 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds per day.
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Mon, 2011-08-22 04:32
#3
Rada Ion
Re: Solar Calender
Ahuh, I just started reading that book so I must have not gotten to that section yet.
Mon, 2011-08-22 04:38
#4
Xagroth
Re: Solar Calender
The really interesting point will be about rimward... What kind of calendar would people follow, for example, when living in one of Saturn's Moons? Do the Jovian Republic use a standard calendar, or a "revolutionary" one? And what about the habitats aroundd Pluto... or the Kuiper Belt?
Oh, and there is also the Exoplanets. Would they use a "foundation calendar"? A locally adapted one?
Personally, for sunward I would only doubt the people living in the Sun (suryas, salamanders...), considering almost everything else as traditionalist who use the old Earth's calendar. Mars is an obvious exception now that has been mentioned, since, well, they must pay attention to planetary weather.
Mon, 2011-08-22 06:58
#5
Arenamontanus
Re: Solar Calender
I sometimes like to have AIs and researchers use metric time: "Just wait a kilosecond." The fall was 315 megaseconds ago.
But the truth is, old timekeeping systems become less and less important as people live in environments with either no daily/seasonal cycles, or with cycles that are unimportant to them. People sleep far less, reset their biological clocks with melatonin, and communicate globally across worlds. So the only thing needed is to be able to agree on when something happened/will happen, and set up cyclical activities in a convenient way.
So I suspect the real issue for time is going to be business: what is the banking month, when are payment/taxes/indenture due? Similar for festivals (when is Christmas? How many do we want per year?) and societal coordination (when to have elections?)
A lot of this can simply be handled by translating muses. 4th of Rajab 1563 is Saturday 12th July 10 AF is Twoday the 19th 3 ab urbe condita is Julian date 2502140 is Unix 5,320,712,448 (ignoring relativistic correction).
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Mon, 2011-08-22 15:13
#6
750
Re: Solar Calender
Was it the french that tried a base 10 calendar once?
And on that note, i would think that a AI would be just as likely to use a binary based calendar and clock. Perhaps converted to octal or hex in interaction with non-digital entities.
Heh, just reminded myself that Swatch created "internet time" during the dotcom boom. And they appear to still support that idea: http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime.html
Basically the day is divided into 1000 beats, with the zero line synced with central european time (the timezone of the Swatch hq). So at the stroke of midnight CET, Swatch internet time will be @000 (no need for the leading 1, as the range will be 000-999). Sometimes a .0-9 is added for higher resolution. The main problem is converting between local time and internet time.
Mon, 2011-08-22 22:58
#7
jackgraham
Re: Solar Calender
Yeah, I've always been a fan of megaseconds a la Vinge's [i]Deepness in the Sky,[/i] and I think H+ would eventually move toward something like them in a spaceward diaspora. (The megasecond is also nice because it's around 20 minutes -- long enough to be a handy unit of time).
Part of the reason we stuck with an Earth-based calendar for places that don't have weather is the Fall. In EP, H+'s brush with extinction & the ruin of Earth fostered a lot of nostalgia & tradition for things like bipedal anthroform morphs and old modes of time keeping that have been abandoned much more quickly in a pure hard SF H+ setting.
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Mon, 2011-08-22 23:01
#8
jackgraham
Re: Solar Calender
Yeah, during La Revolution. The story I've often heard repeated was that it gave farmers a hell of a time, because their oxen, being critters of habit, refused to work on what would have been Sunday.
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J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!
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