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.
Can we improve things a bit? Hoping we can get a calendar with no leap year, even number of days in each month, no daylight savings, etc
Edit: obviously no one got what i meant. We can base the day of the year on whatever the fuck you want, but for the love of god can we not split it into twelve randomly numbered chunks, i hate how our months are!!
There is a calendar that proposes to have 13 months, each with 28 days. That gives you 364 days. Day 365 is new years day and is not part of any month. There are still leap years because as stated, the Earth goes around the sun in 365.24… days. To not need leap years we’d need that to be a whole number.
I really like that one! Guess there’s really no easy way around leap day, but i was thinking you could add an extra ~60.684 seconds to each day and pretend its the same thing? Even increasing the second to be slightly longer could make it possible i think, since we are restarting from scratch it would be easier to adjust it slightly
Then change how years or days are defined or something. I demand a reasonable system ffs
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.
…calendar with no leap year …
This would need the Earth to make one complete rotation around the Sun in an exact whole number of times it rotates around itself. …which is not the case right now and extremely difficult (meaning near impossible) to change.
…no daylight savings…
Okay but now we have a greater problem : we have to change (twice, a year) the time when business, school , stores etc… open and close, for it to be convenient with outside natural light. So, in my opinion, this is not an improvement.
Nah fuck it, change something, its all made up anyways!! The whole idea of our “years” doesn’t make any sense on other planets, so we potentially could define some arbitrary system to it.
Not sure if you’re joking or just having a slow day, but neither the length of a day nor the length of a year are arbitrary. One is the length of a revolution of the earth around its own axis, the other is the time the earth takes to complete a full run around the sun. Those two aren’t fully in sync, and to line them up would require a major feat of astroengineering. Given sufficient advances in science, we might get there in a few millennia, if we’re still around by then, but until then leap years are here to stay.
