6 ms·

I wonder if Sci-Fi novels contain any info on time representation, reference, and distribution.

WorldMaker 2y ago
There's a lot of fascinating discussion around Star Trek's Stardate and its seemingly universal metric calendar and times referenced as decimal units of day: How does it adjust for relativity? Why did they choose the epoch they seemingly chose? (Not that many days before Enterprise's 5-Year-Mission, and seemingly still years into Starfleet's existence.) How do you account for the various obvious real world facts that many episodes just picked numbers that sounded cool or random and didn't pay attention if they were in the right order in the season or overall timeline? (Is that relativistic problems creeping in?) They are called Stardates implying the base unit is a Day, but it is an Earth-like 24 hour day or was it something else, perhaps in a compromise with other Federation planets? From the TNG era onward the various Writer's Bibles took an approach of 10,000 days per season to make the math easy if a script was given a Stardate in the right season and plenty of room for all the scripts in a season to have their own Stardates. If the Stardate day is a 24 hour Earth day equivalent then seasons were expected to take roughly 3 earth years. Or was that a sign that the Stardate day was about a third shorter than an Earth day and "five-year mission" did still just refer to Earth standard years? There are all kinds of fan theories. Some weird things in canon. Some weirder things in the books and other bits of Beta and Gamma "canon". (I did a bit too deep of a dive into Stardates recently as an offshoot of getting the idea to try to display a Stardate-like calendar and date stamps in the configurable calendar system of the Fantasy Grounds TTRPG hosting application.)
- Rhapso 2y ago
  It is very clear that relativity and time dilation due to relative velocity is not part of Star Trek cannon. They live in a "Toy" universe where everything is easy and quartz crystals can be used for FTL travel.
  - largbae 2y ago
    To be fair, once one assumes FTL communication is available, relativity is no longer relevant or necessary.
    - Rhapso 2y ago
      "We are Legion: We are Bob" is a scifi story that has both. It basically turns the "range" of communication into relative velocity, as relative time dilation shifts transmission frequency beyond processability. An intermediary with lower relative velocity to both can act as MITM.
nickdothutton 2y ago
And I can see already from the child comments you folks did not disappoint :-)
akira2501 2y ago
Famously Orson Scott Card just invented a device that explicitly ignores it.
bloopernova 2y ago
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy mentions the longer Martian day. The extra 39 minutes were represented by a 39 minute midnight clock freeze between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01. It was never mentioned how this worked across the entire planet. Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series (starting with Dauntless) has a lot of time involved, due to military fleets/flotillas maneuvers at light-hour distances: Fleet A jumps into a system. Fleet B is 6 light hours distant across the system. B won't see light from A's arrival for 6 hours. A won't see B's reaction for 12 hours, less any distance covered. Ships can engage in combat at up to 0.2c relative velocity, at a maximum distance of about 1 light second. Fleet A accelerates to 0.1c, Fleet B does the same and they approach. Time to contact is 30 hours, and the books discuss how difficult it is for humans to rest and focus on other things during that time. Our instinctive fight/flight/fawn/freeze reaction doesn't translate well to waiting 30 hours! Fleet A and B approach, but because the ships take a few seconds to pivot/roll/yaw to maneuver, so there's a critical time period where A or B can change position and the opposing fleet won't have time to react before the fleets clash. This is used to great effect by the skilled fleet commander of the Good Guys. The lost fleet books also discuss maneuvering fleet formations when everyone is at light-minute or multiple light second distances. There's lots of orders like "at time 15, Echo One pivot formation down 30 degrees and starboard 15 degrees". Learning to bring all your firepower to bear on the enemy at a single moment, while denying them the same opportunity, is a very difficult skill to learn in these books. Aaand I've written way too much. And probably not done the fantastic combat in the lost fleet books any justice at all.
- hinkley 2y ago
  In high school a significant fraction of the effort I put into doing math in my head was expended so that, when playing a game called Galactic Conquest, all of my attack fleets would show up in the same turn. Or two turns, if I was still manufacturing ships. And then I got sneakier and would send a false fleet to attack the wrong planet in turn X, and the real fleet would show up one or two turns later on the opposite side of the victim’s empire, just after they had committed every spare ship in their navy to a jump in the wrong direction, tying up their logistics until after the fight was over and I was rebuilding planetary defenses, preparing for the counterattack.
- 2y ago
SaberTail 2y ago
In Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, ships in the far distant future are still counting time from the Unix epoch. The common belief in the novel, though, is that it's measuring time from when humans first became space-faring by walking on the moon. But I don't recall it mentioning that there's any attempt to account for relativity; ships all keep their own local time.
- krisoft 2y ago
  Exactly! Also that they measure time not in minutes, hours and days, but in the kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  The exact quote is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interstellar_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interste... > Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

There's a lot of fascinating discussion around Star Trek's Stardate and its seemingly universal metric calendar and times referenced as decimal units of day: How does it adjust for relativity? Why did they choose the epoch they seemingly chose? (Not that many days before Enterprise's 5-Year-Mission, and seemingly still years into Starfleet's existence.) How do you account for the various obvious real world facts that many episodes just picked numbers that sounded cool or random and didn't pay attention if they were in the right order in the season or overall timeline? (Is that relativistic problems creeping in?) They are called Stardates implying the base unit is a Day, but it is an Earth-like 24 hour day or was it something else, perhaps in a compromise with other Federation planets? From the TNG era onward the various Writer's Bibles took an approach of 10,000 days per season to make the math easy if a script was given a Stardate in the right season and plenty of room for all the scripts in a season to have their own Stardates. If the Stardate day is a 24 hour Earth day equivalent then seasons were expected to take roughly 3 earth years. Or was that a sign that the Stardate day was about a third shorter than an Earth day and "five-year mission" did still just refer to Earth standard years? There are all kinds of fan theories. Some weird things in canon. Some weirder things in the books and other bits of Beta and Gamma "canon". (I did a bit too deep of a dive into Stardates recently as an offshoot of getting the idea to try to display a Stardate-like calendar and date stamps in the configurable calendar system of the Fantasy Grounds TTRPG hosting application.)

Rhapso 2y ago
It is very clear that relativity and time dilation due to relative velocity is not part of Star Trek cannon. They live in a "Toy" universe where everything is easy and quartz crystals can be used for FTL travel.
- largbae 2y ago
  To be fair, once one assumes FTL communication is available, relativity is no longer relevant or necessary.
  - Rhapso 2y ago
    "We are Legion: We are Bob" is a scifi story that has both. It basically turns the "range" of communication into relative velocity, as relative time dilation shifts transmission frequency beyond processability. An intermediary with lower relative velocity to both can act as MITM.

nickdothutton 2y ago

And I can see already from the child comments you folks did not disappoint :-)

akira2501 2y ago

Famously Orson Scott Card just invented a device that explicitly ignores it.

bloopernova 2y ago

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy mentions the longer Martian day. The extra 39 minutes were represented by a 39 minute midnight clock freeze between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01. It was never mentioned how this worked across the entire planet. Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series (starting with Dauntless) has a lot of time involved, due to military fleets/flotillas maneuvers at light-hour distances: Fleet A jumps into a system. Fleet B is 6 light hours distant across the system. B won't see light from A's arrival for 6 hours. A won't see B's reaction for 12 hours, less any distance covered. Ships can engage in combat at up to 0.2c relative velocity, at a maximum distance of about 1 light second. Fleet A accelerates to 0.1c, Fleet B does the same and they approach. Time to contact is 30 hours, and the books discuss how difficult it is for humans to rest and focus on other things during that time. Our instinctive fight/flight/fawn/freeze reaction doesn't translate well to waiting 30 hours! Fleet A and B approach, but because the ships take a few seconds to pivot/roll/yaw to maneuver, so there's a critical time period where A or B can change position and the opposing fleet won't have time to react before the fleets clash. This is used to great effect by the skilled fleet commander of the Good Guys. The lost fleet books also discuss maneuvering fleet formations when everyone is at light-minute or multiple light second distances. There's lots of orders like "at time 15, Echo One pivot formation down 30 degrees and starboard 15 degrees". Learning to bring all your firepower to bear on the enemy at a single moment, while denying them the same opportunity, is a very difficult skill to learn in these books. Aaand I've written way too much. And probably not done the fantastic combat in the lost fleet books any justice at all.

hinkley 2y ago
In high school a significant fraction of the effort I put into doing math in my head was expended so that, when playing a game called Galactic Conquest, all of my attack fleets would show up in the same turn. Or two turns, if I was still manufacturing ships. And then I got sneakier and would send a false fleet to attack the wrong planet in turn X, and the real fleet would show up one or two turns later on the opposite side of the victim’s empire, just after they had committed every spare ship in their navy to a jump in the wrong direction, tying up their logistics until after the fight was over and I was rebuilding planetary defenses, preparing for the counterattack.
2y ago

SaberTail 2y ago

In Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, ships in the far distant future are still counting time from the Unix epoch. The common belief in the novel, though, is that it's measuring time from when humans first became space-faring by walking on the moon. But I don't recall it mentioning that there's any attempt to account for relativity; ships all keep their own local time.

krisoft 2y ago
Exactly! Also that they measure time not in minutes, hours and days, but in the kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ceejayoz 2y ago
The exact quote is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interstellar_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interste... > Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.