Time

[torainfor]

If a planet has a day that's equal to its year (yes, I'm talking about Venus, here), how would you measure time? I don't mean year-fraction, but hours? Minutes? Even the spanse of time we call a "day" would be meaningless.

[korora]

Is this a homeworld or a colony world? If the former, I'd say go by how long it takes for the stars wheel in the sky and subdivide that by powers of whatever base the locals count in. If the latter, the locals could take old measurements with them.

Eudyptula albosignata

[myrthman]

Maybe they use "fallings" or some such instead of "hours" where time is measured between leaves that fall off trees. It might not be as regular as our units of measurement or then it might. It's your world. You could come up with just about anything that happens on a regular enough basis for the natives to establish clocks. Perhaps a storm every 12 "hours" or a certain animal that gestates every 6?

[Jeff Gerke]

Fascinating question. I can see that they'd measure seasons in a manner similar to how we measure the parts of a day. Except there, it would be morning for a fifth of the year. They'd have a few subdivisions of night, too.

As for daily or hourly measurements...hmm. I like Korora's thought about the movement of the stars, although that would be pretty slow, too, I'm thinking.

They would probably not be doing what we're doing: looking at a timelessness and trying to impose a system of subdivision on it. Rather, their sense of time would come later, after millennia of the development of their species or civiliation. It would arise from natural events produced by the planet or the sun or the moon(s) or the sky.

Does the planet have seismic activity at a certain time every day? Does the atmosphere grow orange once a week? Is there an Old Faithful that goes off every hour everywhere across the planet? Do the moons appear on a regular and recurring basis?

Jeff

[kouter]

Depending on the level of civilization, they could use radiation decay as a standard of time. Our Second is based upon the decay rate of Carsium-133. You'll have to look it up to get the full details.

That aside the most important thing to focus on would be the culture. If the day is the same as a year, how long is the year? Is it equivalent to one of our years, less? more? The day would seem like seasons. I could suggest doing some research on how people live in alaska during the seasons, something like that. Their whole culture would be based on this strange cycle. Makes for some interesting possibilities I must say.

[Teskas]

If it is any help, scientists call a day on Mars a "sol".

[mongoose]

Cool mention of Alaska (I do love my home). But for a little more detail on that . . .

In this day and age everyone, even here in Alaska, works off of the same time system as anywhere else in the Western world. Minutes, hours, days, years. The difference is that we don't hold to these standards quite as tightly as elsewhere, especially as you get more rural. We who live in Anchorage, the largest city in the state, sometimes wonder at people who live in the villages. You tell them a church service will begin at 6:00pm. At 6:30, one or a few people might arrive. Depending on the weather, or whatever, at 7:30 the rest of the congregation might show up. If it's supposed to be a two hour service, it might actually end at 10:30, but it just as well might last until 11:00pm. And if it's the summer, it doesn't make a bit of difference, because effectively, it's still mid-evening.

If you ignore the clock all-together, however, things change even more, and your time is determined entirely by what's happening around you. I've been on backpacking, kayaking, and canoe trips where we learned the "rhythm of the place." There's a time of day when the sun rises, when the rain comes, when the insects come out in force, when the sun is high and hot in the sky, when the wind picks up. Our activities were determined by these conditions. You set up camp before it gets cold or before the evening rains fall. You cook dinner, if you can, before the insects come out. You walk when it's not too hot. You begin your paddle as the tide goes out. You sleep when you're tired, or when it's dark, or when it's too cold to function. Fortunately, these events seem to occur about twice per rotation of the Earth, so you get to do everything once or twice a day.

But then everything stops or slows down if there's a storm. If we're coming from the front country, and planning to travel for four days in the back-country, we have to allow 5 just in-case we get laid up to wait for a storm to pass for one of those days. We bring things to do in our tents.

If you're going to be out for a season or more, things change again. Certain routs you might want to travel are impassable during parts of the year. For instance, the arctic tundra is too mushy to walk or drive across effectively during the summer, so most of the travel is limited to the rivers, or during the winter to the ice roads or other clear ice or snow routs. That's why the oil companies have stopped hiring people to work on the North Slope, until next fall. The fish only run during part of the year, so that's when you move to the fish camp, or take your boat out for the commercial haul. If you hunt Caribou, or whale, they have their runs, and you follow them, or go to where they will be, and take what you can while they're there. So your entire life; what you do when; depends on the light, the weather, and what your food source is doing. In town where we have electric lights, climate control in our buildings and vehicles, and atomic clocks all of this is less of a factor. It still affects our biological systems, and when it's dark and snowing we're slower getting places, and tend to be late, but we try to either ignore or joke about our susceptibility to the control of our environment.

[torainfor]

Thanks, Mongoose, that's huge.

I have a dominant minority who travel three times a year. They have three cities, and all live in one at a time. They, obviously, divide the year into thirds.

I have another bunch of people who only live in one place. They could easily divide the year into fourths: toward dawn, toward the sun, away from the sun, away from "nightfall."

Then I have nomads.

Since their ancestors were from Earth, pre-flood, and knew what a 24-hour day and a 7-day week are, I can see how they would try to force that to fit. (A Venusian day is 243 Earth days. A Venusian year is 225 Earth days. Add into that factors of three, four, and seven and you have...a mess.) But then, I can see how, once the realities of the situation became apparent, they'd completely ignore any attempt to be so rigid. Venus's orbit is nearly circular so, geologically, it would seem the "year" means very little. Of course, astrologically (star patterns) it would have significance. But then, their atmosphere is too dense to see stars...which means the year would have no significance.

Wow. That's deep.

Thank you, everybody, for your inputs. This will be very helpful when defining the cultural and traditions of the different people groups. Strangely enough, it originated from my need to figure out how long it took the people in the story to do the stuff I wanted them to do.

[Therin]

May 27, 2008 9:27:17 GMT -5 torainfor said:

I have another bunch of people who only live in one place. They could easily divide the year into fourths: toward dawn, toward the sun, away from the sun, away from "nightfall."

So are you saying that they divide their year based off where the sun is in their sky? Because if 1 year = 1 day, the sun will always be in the same place. The planet making one revolution and one rotation at the same time means that one side will always face the sun and one side will always face away.

But then again, what if it rotates the other way? Hmmm...

Yes, if that were the case, a day would be like our day with morning and evening, day and night. It would just be 365.25 times longer.

My bad!

[torainfor]

Yeah, Venus rotates opposite. Its day is actually longer than its year but, with all the cloud cover, I don't think you'd notice.

[CastleLyons]

I know it's been awhile since this thread has been addressed, but I just saw something on the Food Network that related to the topic. According to "Good Eats," the Incas measured time according to how long it took to cook potatoes.

[Jeff Gerke]

That's hysterical. And logical.

Imagine a society in which there were official time-keeping offices in every city in which the people did nothing but cook potatoes and three-minute eggs to mark the passage of time.

That's brilliant.