Think “you wake up in the woods naked,” Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?
My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit’s dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.
I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.
That’s as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.
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Well pretty much everyone likes defining a day based on the position of the sun in the sky. While sun rise and sunset might change over the course of the year, nearly everyone agrees that noon is when the sun is the highest in the sky (ignoring day light savings and time zone effects). Turns out people don’t like it when noon occurs in the middle of the night (which would happen if we changes it to any other length of time).
Likewise, nearly everyone has agreed for millenia that a year is defined by earth’s position within its orbit. We know that based on where the stars are at night. Again, people didn’t like having snow during July (which actually happened because the calendar was so far off).
These are not definitions that we can change or have any control over. Additionally, the length of a year (to get earth back to the same spot in its orbit) divided by the length of a day (the time between the sun reaching its apex one day and the next) is not an integer and there’s nothing that says it has to be.
We can’t change it, so if thats important to you, you’ll have to find another planet to live on.
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I’m personally not voting on your comments, but you are probably being down voted because you are either being purposefully ignorant or you are continuing to insist on a “better system” that is physically impossible.
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Sure, in that scenario, such a system would be possible. Hopefully, there is still an earth to communicate with however. So we’d have to keep using earth days and years to enable effective communication. Also, the entire ship would have been built using earth based units, so it might be easier to use the system we’ve already got.
you just have the ship day be the same length as an earth day and start count from day 0. So the ship launches and it clock starts ticking. Now you do need to ask is this going fast enough that time dilation is a thing? That will change how well it can ever sync up to earth.
We’re not on a space ship though. We’re on Earth, so what happens on this planet matters. You may care more about not having leap years, but the majority of us care about knowing approximately what the weather will look like at a given point in time and how much sunlight to expect, since those things actually affect our daily lives, whereas an extra day in a given month does not.
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You can come up with new timekeeping systems when you need them. It’s not like we can’t convert between them.
Then two years later, the sun will be at its peak at midnight.
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oh i know the answer. Since a mars day is about 15 minutes longer and out rover there are solar powered it was important that the human operators of them knew what time it was on mars. Nasa’s answer, make a watch that runs about 2% slower. that git the mars watch an extra 15 minutes and so it syncs to the martian sun.
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A ritual calendar would work. How long is a year, say the length of a human pregnancy. How long is a month, one tenth of a year.
Boom no more leap years or leap months and no more tracking solstices.