How Would a Post-Planetary Civilization Measure Time?
Our perception of time is steeped in the rhythms of our world, and blended with the most ancient of superstitions, decrees and mathematical conveniences. Thus we have days that track our world's rotation relative to the sun (or the sun's apparent motion in the sky), richly divisible (but otherwise unwieldy) 60-based subdivisions of that, weekdays that bear the names of Gods and planets, months based (in the West) on the old Roman standardization of the phases of the Moon, and years that reflect the passing of the seasons on Earth (and thus Earth's orbital cycles around its sun).
Now, in the ages to come, unless it comes to stumble and foolishly fall on its face, Humanity is likely to leave its cradle and spread the gift of consciousness to our solar system, and perhaps other stars as well.
Assuming that a majority of Humans come to live offworld, what is likely to be the most widely agreed upon way of time-keeping?
Keep in mind that:
- The weight of historical precedent has brought hours from the Sumerians to us, so history has inertia, but the millenia ahead are long indeed.
- It's likely that humans will one day live so far apart that signals will take days or years to travel from one community to another. Our larger solar system is about 10 of what we now call light hours across.
- It's possible that humans will live at different timescales due to some humans uploading (and living at Gigahertz speeds?), or due to differences caused by time dilation during long near-luminal voyages.
- Humans and their machine descendants may or may not retain the hard-coded ~24h sleeping cycle and body rhythms
- If our computers retain the same basic priciples, we may preserve Unix epoch time for a while.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/14254. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Each planet would have a standard time, with periods that make sense. Mars day is 20 some minutes longer than Earth. So you could just add a couple minutes here or there, or do a time slip, where the clock his midnight and stops for 20 minutes, then starts again.
Each planet would have its own time, and then there would be a galactic time, like the Unix timestamp or Star Trek's stardate. Something that has no relation to any planet or star. It would mostly only be used on board starships and inner inter planetary communications/business.
Maybe base it on rotations of a central pulsar or something. Something dependable.
Edit:
Humans lives are dictated by circadian rhythms, meaning we sleep, then wake, eat, and eventually have to sleep again. Some people have tried to get around this, but none of the techniques are all that effective. Living outside of the rhythm (3rd shift workers for instance) is hard on your body. You can do it, and get used to it, but 3 A.M. is still going to be a low point.
If they discover a cure for sleep, this could change.
On different worlds with different stars and lengths of day the rhythm will have to be adjusted, but something that feels natural will work out, to the point that most people sleep during one period, and are awake during another period, and eat at roughly the same times, and from that a local time will develop naturally.
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