Would a human individual adapt to a change in the day-night cycle?
I'm thinking on the colonizing of another planet by humans. The conditions of this planet are quite different from Earth, and particularly the day-night cycle is much larger.
In my fictional planet, the day will last 48 hours. The day-time and the night-time is duplicated, and that means than the proportion between the hours of sunlight and the hours of night is the same than in the Earth.
Would the humans living on this planet adapt their sleeping to the new day-nigth cycle, i.e., will they sleep during all night-time and be awaken during day-time? (This is after some years or even, if needed, a couple of generations.)
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1 answer
Actually, an 48 hour cycle is great, because it's exactly twice the normal 24 hour cycle. Thus adaption would be easy; people would just sleep twice for each planetary day. There might, however, be the need to have bright enough illumination during the "night-day" time, in order to stay healthy for a prolonged time (I guess they are on that planet for the whole rest of their life, not just for a year or so).
However, also something else might happen: In experiments to the circadian rhythm where people were living in bunkers without any indication of current time, it turned out that some people actually switched to a ca. 48-hour rhythm, and when the time was over, they didn't believe that much timme had passed because for their own feeling, only half the number of days had passed.
So maybe with an external 48h stimulation, most people would automatically switch to that cycle.
Also note that this cycle is special exactly because it's twice the normal time. On a planet with e.g. 30 hours per day, people would likely experience a permanent jetlag.
Here is an article mentioning the time experiments and the 48h rhythm.
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