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Vernor Vinge's novel, "A Deepness in the Sky", involves an spacefaring civilization that uses metric time (Ksec, Msec) after discarding Earth-based units. A fe
by pklausler 11y ago
Vernor Vinge's novel, "A Deepness in the Sky", involves an spacefaring civilization that uses metric time (Ksec, Msec) after discarding Earth-based units. A feature of the book: the author never gives a footnote explaining how to convert these units to familiar ones, so you have to work it out yourself. Which means that you'll never forget it once you've done the homework.
(Also, there's the old rule-of-thumb from Grace Murray Hopper that "pi seconds equals a nanocentury".)
- nitrogen 11y agoIn my copy there's a timescale legend inside the front cover, and I've mostly forgotten the conversions.
- panglott 11y agoThe problem with kiloseconds/megaseconds/&c. is that the time units are simply not human scale. Your base units are 1 second, 16 minutes, 11 days, and 31 years. If you want to talk about a period of a few days, you're talking about hundreds of 16-minute periods. If you're talking about a few years, you're talking about hundreds of near-fortnights. If you sleep one unit of time per two waking units, you'll have a couple of leftover time units here and there. http://panglott.blogspot.com/2009/06/kiloseconds-brevels.html http://panglott.blogspot.com/2009/06/kiloseconds-brevels.htm... http://panglott.blogspot.com/2013/06/timekeeping-in-embassytown.html http://panglott.blogspot.com/2013/06/timekeeping-in-embassyt...
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoJust make 100,000 seconds in a 'day' and be done with it.