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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
by 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 agoExactly! Also that they measure time not in minutes, hours and days, but in the kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe 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.