32
votes
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
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- Title
- foone on Twitter: "Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them / Twitter"
- Authors
- foone
- Word count
- 37 words
This is assuming the aliens are entirely logical, and don't have similar cultural/religious/historical quirks in their various systems of measurement that they would have to also explain to us. But regardless, this was still a fun little read showing just how absurd our calendar and time system actually is when you look at it from a purely logical perspective. :)
I was going to say pretty much the same. A friendly first encounter of aliens would be a dick measuring contest of who is carrying more historical baggage. Only a hivemind would have the unity to reform something so fundamental yet inconsequential. Or maybe they have even more intellectual inertia than species of individuals. These systems are hard to reform because a lot of stuff depends on it being kept consistent, while the exact format of it is often inconsequential. Change is hard, and not very rewarding. Because you interact with date/time so often, it becomes second nature no matter how badly it's bodged. I'd expect we wouldn't even notice the weirdness of 12h AM/PM time if we didn't also have large parts of the world operating on 24h time.
The hard part about these fundamental, historically grown systems is when we use multiple different ones. See metric/imperial.
Large portion of the world checking in: we use 24h time constantly, specially when there's no tolerance for ambiguity (in writing almost always, often spoken as well, for brevity and precision).
Forms like "8 in the morning", or "5 in the afternoon" are common in conversation. And we have equivalents for "noon" and "midnight".
We'll drop disambiguation altogether when the context is unambiguous, for instance: "I wake up for work at 8 every day", or "the matinee starts at 10". And most of us can "convert" from 24h to 12h time in less than a second without even thinking.
Adopting metric can be really complicated. 24h time? Nah, it's easy, mostly because you don't need to throw 12h time away. And the reason to adopt 24h time is that it's better for mental calculation.
Other than that, I can't think of a single advantage for 24h time that would matter for anyone that is not a programmer. My Casio wristwatch has both modes, and there's a button to change between them. I can read it either way, but I prefer 24h time. If a 30-dollar watch can figure it out, is that really such a big deal?
And yeah I though that too :P
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in camp 24h. But I can entirely imagine that if everyone went AM/PM time, we wouldn't even notice how weird it is that we flip AM/PM at noon, but 12:59 to 1:00. It's so inconsequential we could get used to anything. Even in AM/PM all the mental math is basically trivial once you're used to it.
Wait, what? 00:00 is 12AM, 12:00 is 12PM.
I assume I am misreading your comment because you seem to be saying that you don't use AM between 00:00 and 01:00, but instead that's also PM? Meaning you have two hours which are 12pms every day?
I must have that wrong..
No the issue is that we go from 11:59AM to 12:00PM, but then 12:59PM to 1:00PM. 1 does not come after 12, it would be a little more logical if AM->PM and 12->1 happened at the same time. It makes sense if you think about an analog clock, but it's hard to explain without that context.
Edit: Actually no it doesn't really make sense even with an analog clock, really we should rotate everything counterclockwise one hour and 1 should be the first hour at the top of the clock.
Yeah, that makes much more sense than what I was thinking. Yesterday was a long day..
If you move the clock face back an hour then 1PM isn't one hour post meridian.. Changing 12 for zero works, but then you have to say "it's quarter past zero" if someone asks the time.
I actually have no idea what is the weirdness you're referring to :P
See the reply to the sibling comment. But basically, in AM/PM clocks, "PM" isn't just "AM+12 hours", because AM/PM times go by analog clocks (which label the 0 position as 12 because 0 is scary). On an analog clock 00:30 and 12:30 both labeled as 12:30. Basically, you roll over from 11:59AM to 12:00PM, then to 12:59PM, to 1:00 PM.
One way of making it consistent is to call 12:00 just 0:00, then PM is just worth 12 hours and everything is consistent. But that's not how it is.
...and if this wasn't inconsistent enough we actually sometimes use 24:00 instead of 00:00.
That is off-topic, but I was thinking about a tangentially related Alien concept (Star Trek for scale):
Captain Picard must convince an alien civilization with no concept of finitude to leave their home planet that is about to explode.
Base 12 and 60 make sense, because they are very divisible (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and easy to divide by a compass alone
Compare that to base 10, which is very badly divisible (2, 5) and really hard to do with geometry.
But yeah, the whole thing's a bit messy in the end.
I mean, bases are completely replacable. Easy divisibility and the order of magnitudes displayed are your main concerns here. The higher your base, the more different digits you need, but you'll need fewer of them. So I think base 60 is heavily overkill. I have a hard enough time memorizing the order of 26 letters, don't need twice that and keep track of the distances along that ordering.
But beyond that, basically any small non-prime would work reasonably well: 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16 all make for decent bases, it really doesn't matter. Oh, and I'd argue repeated divisibility by one number (like 2) doesn't get you much at all; I can divide a base-10 number by 4 by just adding another digit; that's a feature if its divisibility by 2. So between 12 and 10, it's mostly about whether you like 5 or 3 more. In fact, 6 looks like a decent candidate to me; Very few different digits needed; this simplifies a lot of things, including arithmetic, and you buy it by having "longer" numbers.
The gripe the thread has is with switching base systems. Mortal humans regularly operate in 12-based systems (360 degrees, 60 minutes, 12 hours) and 10-based systems (everything else) and computer scientists add 2 and 16 to the mix. It's messy. Oh, and we write those base-12 numbers using base-10 numbers, which is also fun.
How have I gone all my life not realising that months 9-12 are actually named 7-10? Never crossed my mind, even knowing about the insertion of emperor months.
Lunar months make some sense, but a lunar month doesn't hold an integer number of terrestrial rotations. It's another shame that months get messed about so an integer number of months fits a solar year.
Imagine a different solar system, number of moons, etc., and your hypothetical alien might be more empathetic.
If you really want a wacky look at timekeeping, try this one.
Ha, that's excellent.