What do Martians use for months and weeks?
Assume Mars has developed an indigenous civilization of its own, perhaps as seen in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars.
Much like Earth, Mars' years and days would be significant for any indigenous peoples. These would drive the seasons and daylight periods, such as they are.
But on Earth, there is an intermediate time period that was important from time immemorial: the phases of the Moon. With a period 28 times that of a day, but 1/13 that of a year, the motion of the moon was a good intermediate length unit of time from which, through long evolution, came our modern concepts of month and week.
But on Mars, the moon(s) are nowhere near as prominent as on Earth, and their periods are much shorter. As seen from Mars and measured in Martian days, Phobos will appear and disappear twice a day, Deimos roughly every 2.5 days.
What astronomical phenomenon, visible from the surface of Mars, would replace the Moon's motion as an intermediate measure of time?
Note: Not a duplicate of this, because this question presupposes indigenous Martians, not Earth colonists; and because this question is not about an 'ideal' calendar, but astronomical phenomena.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/100554. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
As you point out, Mars has so much stuff going on in its skies that its moons aren't going to provide meaningful calendrical support. Nothing else is both visible and consistent enough to act as a replacement.
I suggest, therefore, that your indigenous Martians won't look to the sky for divisions of the year. Days yes -- that's regular and obvious, so unless your Martians have a very short or very long "biological day" cycle, they can make use of that. (I'm taking it as implied in your question that your Martians don't, say, hibernate for an Earth month every other month, or sleep 15 minutes every hour, or something like that.)
Seasons are provided by the sun (and axial tilt), so those still work. Subdivisions of seasons could be provided by either computation or function. By computation, I mean that your Martians might find that the concept of "tenth of a season" or "quarter of a season" is a meaningful currency; if so, they can designate it without regard to visible markers. Our weeks are like that; they aren't quarters of the monthly lunar cycle. We humans have just found a unit of seven days to be useful. Your Martians can do that too.
Alternatively, they might have sub-season units of time based on things they do -- plowing time, planting time, livestock birthing time, and so on. These chunks of time will not be uniform in length. They also will not be uniform across the whole planet, so once your Martians develop global communication, functional designations won't work as functional designations. They could remain as historical designations -- they don't plow during this time now, but this stretch of time is still called "plowing time" because they once did. Planet-wide standardization of timekeeping was a late development here on Earth, when synchronization of (e.g.) train schedules became necessary. Your Martians won't need to all agree on time designations until they're interacting (and scheduling events) with other groups with different calendars.
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