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Calendars are such ugly hacks. We should fix the year so we can design a properly engineered calendar... what would it take to shift Earth into another orbit?

lostlogin 5y ago
I suspect do that would be more acceptable than removing day light saving.
betterunix2 5y ago
A lot of energy. Probably more than the world uses in an entire year, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for the reader. (Kind of reminds me of the analysis of how much energy the death star would require to destroy an entire planet, and what kind of energy density would be required to do it from a facility that is the size of a "small moon.")
- dmd 5y ago
  I mean, it really depends on what's meant by "another orbit". Even the most minuscule change is "another orbit".
- carlob 5y ago
  > Probably more than the world uses in an entire year, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for the reader. My back of the napkin estimate says about 7 orders of magnitude more, just to eliminate leap years.
saalweachter 5y ago
I mean, at some point (hopefully) humans will be living on more than one planetary body in the solar system. Once you have people on Mars and Earth, you're never going to harmonize the two, without shifting both to the same orbit. So you could just give up on having the planet's orbit define the calendar, design a pleasing civil calendar for your civilization that is probably roughly a Earth year long, but without all the hacks to make it exact or synchronized, and just let your cell phone add a calendar event for when spring, etc starts.
giovannibonetti 5y ago
I liked Kodak's division of the year in 13-months with roughly 28 days. Only one month would be different, with 29 or 30 days.
toyg 5y ago
The International Fixed Calendar was a work of elegant beauty and it’s a shame we are not using it.
peter303 5y ago
Plus the Earth is erratic in its movements compared to atomic clocks. When they switched the definition from a fraction of an astronomical day to wavelengths of a particular Cesium photon, they would have to add a leap second a few times a decade. Last year they were considering subtracting a second because the Earth speed up its orbit for unknown causes.

lostlogin 5y ago

I suspect do that would be more acceptable than removing day light saving.

betterunix2 5y ago

A lot of energy. Probably more than the world uses in an entire year, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for the reader. (Kind of reminds me of the analysis of how much energy the death star would require to destroy an entire planet, and what kind of energy density would be required to do it from a facility that is the size of a "small moon.")

dmd 5y ago
I mean, it really depends on what's meant by "another orbit". Even the most minuscule change is "another orbit".
carlob 5y ago
> Probably more than the world uses in an entire year, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for the reader. My back of the napkin estimate says about 7 orders of magnitude more, just to eliminate leap years.

saalweachter 5y ago

I mean, at some point (hopefully) humans will be living on more than one planetary body in the solar system. Once you have people on Mars and Earth, you're never going to harmonize the two, without shifting both to the same orbit. So you could just give up on having the planet's orbit define the calendar, design a pleasing civil calendar for your civilization that is probably roughly a Earth year long, but without all the hacks to make it exact or synchronized, and just let your cell phone add a calendar event for when spring, etc starts.

giovannibonetti 5y ago

I liked Kodak's division of the year in 13-months with roughly 28 days. Only one month would be different, with 29 or 30 days.

toyg 5y ago

The International Fixed Calendar was a work of elegant beauty and it’s a shame we are not using it.

peter303 5y ago

Plus the Earth is erratic in its movements compared to atomic clocks. When they switched the definition from a fraction of an astronomical day to wavelengths of a particular Cesium photon, they would have to add a leap second a few times a decade. Last year they were considering subtracting a second because the Earth speed up its orbit for unknown causes.