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.
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.
I know what “we like”. I am saying we should change it in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic scenario where humanity joins hands together and demand a yearly calendar that makes more sense. Don’t know why this is getting downvoted, guess you’re all taking me wayy too seriously lol
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.
