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Every time someone mentioned "days" or "months" or "years" in Andor I had to mentally zap my brain not to think about how it doesn't make a sense across a galax

Every time someone mentioned "days" or "months" or "years" in Andor I had to mentally zap my brain not to think about how it doesn't make a sense across a galaxy.

jerf 1y ago
Consider it a translation convention. There's a time and a place for "cycles" or "rels" or whatever, but it gets into "Calling a Rabbit a 'Smeerp'" [1] territory pretty quickly. The payoff isn't really all that great. Stargate SG-1 is one of my favorite instances of this. The first couple of episodes address the fact that the Earth characters do not speak the same languages as everyone else in the galaxy. Then, having established the point that A: the show runners understand this is an issue and B: it makes for a rather tedious watch, they moved on to "everyone speaks English" and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I just think of it as part of the "camera" now. It turns out that we don't necessarily want a truly literal recording of what such things would look like. [1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmeerp https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
- tetha 1y ago
  I think that these fundamental things can be turned into an interesting topic, but you have to try for it. Like, in a story background I'm pushing around, there's a coalition of a large amount of species developed on different planets. And you're a military officer, and you need to coordinate shifts, but - assuming some collectively normalized number of hours - some of your tiny dudes are tuned to 3 hours of sleep, 3 hours of leisure and 3 hours of work, others weird dudes with 2 arms and 2 legs are tuned to 38 hour cycles, and some huge dudes with a trunk in their face are tuned to 356 hour cycles. Even if you could train and adjust this by an hour or two (which, for the 3 hour dudes would compare to an 8 earth-hour extension of duty for us), how the heck would you coordinate any kind of shifts across this? Or does every species have their own schedule? Good look finding crossover meetings then. Some of the small guys would have to do overtime for longer meetings even. But you have to make it a point of the story and the challenges if you want to include it. If it is just a weird side note, just say that they figured out a conversion and that's it.
  - jerf 1y ago
    Some Star Trek books took the opportunity to work multiple species into the Enterprise's roster, when you don't have special effects problems with doing so. But some others took the approach that Starfleet has a lot of vessels, and they're still somewhat segregated by species just because of those issues, and while the TV series don't corroborate that very well, I think it's better fanon overall. Peace and harmony among the species is great and all but trying to work 17 hour shifts in 2.5 Gs is going to get really old for the humans. And who wants to wear complicated breathing apparatuses for years at a time? It would be an interesting direction to take a book series in... why do we see so much about the Klingons and Cardassians and Vulcans on TV? It's not because they're the only important species, it's because they're the species that breath our atmosphere at more-or-less our gravity and solar cycles. The Federation could be a whole bunch of parallel Federations-within-a-Federation where there's an entire set of species who also crew with each other but breath methane, need .7G, and work around 14-hour day/night cycles, and they just don't interact much with each other, not because they hate each other but just because it's so tedious to have prolonged contact.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > The payoff isn't really all that great. If you’ve read David Weber’s Safehold series, this point gets super clear. It's written with names like "Zherald Ahdymsyn" (Gerald Adamson), but that makes it quite the slog for many.
  - skrebbel 1y ago
    I could not get through Banks’ “Feersum Endjinn” for this sole reason. English isn't my first language, though I’m fluent in it and read lots of hard sci-fi in it. But half a book using English “spelling rules” applied haphazardly just to make a minor point about one character was well beyond my capacity. I quoted “spelling rules” on purpose because let’s be honest, English doesn’t really have any. You couldn’t translate that novel to Italian or Finnish, or any language with proper phonetical spelling.
    - UltraSane 1y ago
      As a native speaker I found it pretty easy to read.
- jgauth 1y ago
  "The Hunt for Red October" had an interesting way of handling this with the Russian speakers. The movie starts with them speaking Russian with English subtitles, does a slow zoom into the Russian-speaker's lips, and switches to English mid-sentence.
  - jkingsman 1y ago
    With some elegance, too; iirc they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" as he reads from the bible, the Latin word for a location near Jerusalem, but having a non-English/non-Russian word be when they switch made it a lot less jarring. Plus, having it be during a read-out-loud-from-book portion allowed for more measured cadence that smoothed the switch but probably would have felt jarring if the audience were parsing multi-character dialogue when it happened.
    - nwallin 1y ago
      > they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" "Armageddon" actually. Poignant because it's a movie about a nuclear ballistic submarine. But not a particularly non-English word.
      - jkingsman 1y ago
        ahhh I misremembered — an even better choice!
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      > "Golgotha", the latin word Isn't it Hebrew? (for example see John 19,17)
      - defrost 1y ago
        From what I have to hand .. It appeared in the Latin Vulgate (an early predominately Latin version of the Bible), the Oxford English Dictionary has it as an Aramaic form of the Hebrew "gulgōleþ" (copied from the dictionary) or skull like hill.
  - 1y ago
- commandlinefan 1y ago
  Like in Game of Thrones when Davos was trying to learn to read and incorrectly pronounced the word "knight" the way it was spelled - somehow I could accept that everybody in a fictional universe spoke English except for all the ones who spoke other fictional languages, but I drew the line at words being spelled the same as well.
clem 1y ago
Vernor Vinge had it figured out in A Deepness in the Sky with the use of kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  A second is still originally defined as 1/86400 of an Earth day. That doesn't make it unusable as a cross galactic time unit, and I think the same goes for years and hours.
  - gleenn 1y ago
    Case-in-point, you are mistaken. The duration of a day changes due to many things, both logically and also physically due to the nature of Earth. Also just because you can call a second a second doesn't mean that is helpful making datetime software usable or easy on a different planet.
    - mikepurvis 1y ago
      I think he's speaking historically. Obviously now a second is a fundamental SI unit defined in terms of physics experiments, but the origin of it was as the amount of time that was 1/3600th of an hour of which there are 24 in the day.
      - shadowgovt 1y ago
        Similar to how almost-pi-squared meters-per-second shows up in the constant for gravitational acceleration near Earth's surface because the meter was originally "the length of pendulum that ticks once a second" and there's a pi in the pendulum motion equation. (... it's not exactly pi-squared because the French yanked it around a bit before settling into the modern number based on light in a vacuum and cesium atoms).
  - layer8 1y ago
    The issue is that planetary locales will each have their own days and years (and possibly hours), so it would be confusing to adopt that same nomenclature for an interplanetary/interstellar time unit. And since the latter will be inconsistent with local time systems anyway, it’s easier to just have it use powers of ten. At least until we meet aliens that may prefer a different base.
dizhn 1y ago
Babylon 5 times. https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Measurements_of_Time https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Measurements_of_Time Aliens use phrases like " 2 of your Earth days "
Terr_ 1y ago
That makes me think of the foreword Isaac Asimov wrote for Nightfall, explaining his choice of terms: > The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.
mystifyingpoi 1y ago
Well, in entirety of SW (or at least in mainline movies) it is kinda strange, that day and night happens basically on the same 24h period as on our Earth, given that all the planets are different. Could make a much more interesting story without this crutch for the audience.
scbrg 1y ago
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Standard_Calendar#Time_measurement https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Standard_Calendar#... The Galactic Standard Calendar or Galactic Standard Time was the standard measurement of time in the galaxy. It was based on the Coruscant solar cycle. The Coruscant solar cycle was 368 days long with a day consisting of 24 standard hours. 60 standard minutes = 1 standard hour 24 standard hours = 1 standard day 5 standard days = 1 standard week 7 standard weeks = 1 standard month 10 standard months + 3 festival weeks + 3 holidays = 368 standard days = 1 standard year

Every time someone mentioned "days" or "months" or "years" in Andor I had to mentally zap my brain not to think about how it doesn't make a sense across a galaxy.

jerf 1y ago

Consider it a translation convention. There's a time and a place for "cycles" or "rels" or whatever, but it gets into "Calling a Rabbit a 'Smeerp'" [1] territory pretty quickly. The payoff isn't really all that great. Stargate SG-1 is one of my favorite instances of this. The first couple of episodes address the fact that the Earth characters do not speak the same languages as everyone else in the galaxy. Then, having established the point that A: the show runners understand this is an issue and B: it makes for a rather tedious watch, they moved on to "everyone speaks English" and we all breathed a sigh of relief. I just think of it as part of the "camera" now. It turns out that we don't necessarily want a truly literal recording of what such things would look like. [1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmeerp https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...

tetha 1y ago
I think that these fundamental things can be turned into an interesting topic, but you have to try for it. Like, in a story background I'm pushing around, there's a coalition of a large amount of species developed on different planets. And you're a military officer, and you need to coordinate shifts, but - assuming some collectively normalized number of hours - some of your tiny dudes are tuned to 3 hours of sleep, 3 hours of leisure and 3 hours of work, others weird dudes with 2 arms and 2 legs are tuned to 38 hour cycles, and some huge dudes with a trunk in their face are tuned to 356 hour cycles. Even if you could train and adjust this by an hour or two (which, for the 3 hour dudes would compare to an 8 earth-hour extension of duty for us), how the heck would you coordinate any kind of shifts across this? Or does every species have their own schedule? Good look finding crossover meetings then. Some of the small guys would have to do overtime for longer meetings even. But you have to make it a point of the story and the challenges if you want to include it. If it is just a weird side note, just say that they figured out a conversion and that's it.
- jerf 1y ago
  Some Star Trek books took the opportunity to work multiple species into the Enterprise's roster, when you don't have special effects problems with doing so. But some others took the approach that Starfleet has a lot of vessels, and they're still somewhat segregated by species just because of those issues, and while the TV series don't corroborate that very well, I think it's better fanon overall. Peace and harmony among the species is great and all but trying to work 17 hour shifts in 2.5 Gs is going to get really old for the humans. And who wants to wear complicated breathing apparatuses for years at a time? It would be an interesting direction to take a book series in... why do we see so much about the Klingons and Cardassians and Vulcans on TV? It's not because they're the only important species, it's because they're the species that breath our atmosphere at more-or-less our gravity and solar cycles. The Federation could be a whole bunch of parallel Federations-within-a-Federation where there's an entire set of species who also crew with each other but breath methane, need .7G, and work around 14-hour day/night cycles, and they just don't interact much with each other, not because they hate each other but just because it's so tedious to have prolonged contact.
ceejayoz 1y ago
> The payoff isn't really all that great. If you’ve read David Weber’s Safehold series, this point gets super clear. It's written with names like "Zherald Ahdymsyn" (Gerald Adamson), but that makes it quite the slog for many.
- skrebbel 1y ago
  I could not get through Banks’ “Feersum Endjinn” for this sole reason. English isn't my first language, though I’m fluent in it and read lots of hard sci-fi in it. But half a book using English “spelling rules” applied haphazardly just to make a minor point about one character was well beyond my capacity. I quoted “spelling rules” on purpose because let’s be honest, English doesn’t really have any. You couldn’t translate that novel to Italian or Finnish, or any language with proper phonetical spelling.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    As a native speaker I found it pretty easy to read.
jgauth 1y ago
"The Hunt for Red October" had an interesting way of handling this with the Russian speakers. The movie starts with them speaking Russian with English subtitles, does a slow zoom into the Russian-speaker's lips, and switches to English mid-sentence.
- jkingsman 1y ago
  With some elegance, too; iirc they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" as he reads from the bible, the Latin word for a location near Jerusalem, but having a non-English/non-Russian word be when they switch made it a lot less jarring. Plus, having it be during a read-out-loud-from-book portion allowed for more measured cadence that smoothed the switch but probably would have felt jarring if the audience were parsing multi-character dialogue when it happened.
  - nwallin 1y ago
    > they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" "Armageddon" actually. Poignant because it's a movie about a nuclear ballistic submarine. But not a particularly non-English word.
    - jkingsman 1y ago
      ahhh I misremembered — an even better choice!
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    > "Golgotha", the latin word Isn't it Hebrew? (for example see John 19,17)
    - defrost 1y ago
      From what I have to hand .. It appeared in the Latin Vulgate (an early predominately Latin version of the Bible), the Oxford English Dictionary has it as an Aramaic form of the Hebrew "gulgōleþ" (copied from the dictionary) or skull like hill.
- 1y ago
commandlinefan 1y ago
Like in Game of Thrones when Davos was trying to learn to read and incorrectly pronounced the word "knight" the way it was spelled - somehow I could accept that everybody in a fictional universe spoke English except for all the ones who spoke other fictional languages, but I drew the line at words being spelled the same as well.

clem 1y ago

Vernor Vinge had it figured out in A Deepness in the Sky with the use of kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds.

BurningFrog 1y ago
A second is still originally defined as 1/86400 of an Earth day. That doesn't make it unusable as a cross galactic time unit, and I think the same goes for years and hours.
- gleenn 1y ago
  Case-in-point, you are mistaken. The duration of a day changes due to many things, both logically and also physically due to the nature of Earth. Also just because you can call a second a second doesn't mean that is helpful making datetime software usable or easy on a different planet.
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    I think he's speaking historically. Obviously now a second is a fundamental SI unit defined in terms of physics experiments, but the origin of it was as the amount of time that was 1/3600th of an hour of which there are 24 in the day.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      Similar to how almost-pi-squared meters-per-second shows up in the constant for gravitational acceleration near Earth's surface because the meter was originally "the length of pendulum that ticks once a second" and there's a pi in the pendulum motion equation. (... it's not exactly pi-squared because the French yanked it around a bit before settling into the modern number based on light in a vacuum and cesium atoms).
- layer8 1y ago
  The issue is that planetary locales will each have their own days and years (and possibly hours), so it would be confusing to adopt that same nomenclature for an interplanetary/interstellar time unit. And since the latter will be inconsistent with local time systems anyway, it’s easier to just have it use powers of ten. At least until we meet aliens that may prefer a different base.

dizhn 1y ago

Babylon 5 times. https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Measurements_of_Time https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Measurements_of_Time Aliens use phrases like " 2 of your Earth days "

Terr_ 1y ago

That makes me think of the foreword Isaac Asimov wrote for Nightfall, explaining his choice of terms: > The essence of this story doesn't lie in the quantity of bizarre terms we might have invented; it lies, rather, in the reaction of a group of people somewhat like ourselves, living on a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail, as they react to a challenging situation that is completely different from anything the people of Earth have ever had to deal with. Under the circumstances, it seemed to us better to tell you that someone put on his hiking boots before setting out on a seven-mile walk than to clutter the book with quonglishes, vorks, and gleebishes.

mystifyingpoi 1y ago

Well, in entirety of SW (or at least in mainline movies) it is kinda strange, that day and night happens basically on the same 24h period as on our Earth, given that all the planets are different. Could make a much more interesting story without this crutch for the audience.

scbrg 1y ago

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Standard_Calendar#Time_measurement https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Standard_Calendar#... The Galactic Standard Calendar or Galactic Standard Time was the standard measurement of time in the galaxy. It was based on the Coruscant solar cycle. The Coruscant solar cycle was 368 days long with a day consisting of 24 standard hours. 60 standard minutes = 1 standard hour 24 standard hours = 1 standard day 5 standard days = 1 standard week 7 standard weeks = 1 standard month 10 standard months + 3 festival weeks + 3 holidays = 368 standard days = 1 standard year