If clock and calendar was reinvented with today's knowledge, what could they look like?

Our notion of recording and communicating time and date is based on very old concepts, many of them being built upon flawed assumptions (that the Sun should be at exact south at noon, that a year should have an integer number of days, etc.) and cultural heritage (7-day week, the arbitrary beginning of year a week and something after solstice, two months of 31 days in succession), and burdened by little fixes and exceptions trying to maintain as much of "backwards compatibility" as possible (time zones, leap years, leap seconds), not even mentioning atrocities like the daylight savings time. This all not only complicates the matter beyond necessity (the need to remember a lot of stuff for something that's just a unidirectionally flowing one-dimensional quantity) and creates a mild amount of unfairness (e.g., prices per calendar month, deadlines at the end of month but prior to weekends) but also gives computers, who use a completely regular (but not very human-friendly) internal format, a lot of work converting from and to our representation to communicate with us.

What if calendar and clock were designed in a society that knows what we do and our ancestors did not: that the Sun orbits Earth (relativistically speaking) continuously, that there's always noon somewhere, that seasons are the opposite on the opposite hemisphere and work completely different near the Equator, that the rotation of Earth is not synchronized with its orbit in any way? If the primary goals were simplicity and practicality of use for communication with both people in different places and with machines? Minuscule variations in the length of day and relativistic effects would presumably be neglected and the system should be rigid enough to allow such neglection without leaps.

I believe it should still be based on astronomical invariants like the equinoxes and noon to be physiologically relevant, not just blindly counting second after second like computers do. An agreed fixed reference like Year One is very reasonable. But I have a hard time coming with finer divisions of time instead of months and weeks that would make sense. Counting up all the way to 365-something is prone to errors, it would be good if at all levels of precision the data would remain reasonably bounded.

posted over 8 years ago

The Vee‭

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