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
It’s not really worth changing the calendar system. There is a greater benefit in the calendar system being unified across the world, consistent, and stable, rather than the parts adding up perfectly and not being based on a certain culture or religion.
The simplest system may be 13 months of 28 days: every month has exactly 4 weeks, starting with a Monday and ending with a Sunday.
The l
365th day (and 366th in leap years) is a bonus day, a jolly outside of weeks, maybe a bank holiday.
Everyone is happy.
But maybe it doesn’t worth the effort to change a system which is the same in almost all the world, even with a simpler one
Except for nations and religions that celebrate their holidays on a 29th/30th/31st. And businesses because they like accounting in periods smaller than a year like quarters or semesters while 13 is a prime number (still possible but not really neat). Unfortunately.
I’d still root for the International Fixed Calendar though.
Unsure that everything is gonna be fine but the calendar.
This world has a dependency on slavery of non-human people, to the point that the average alien films is a representation of ourselves towards other species (we are really represented at some point as the aliens) but this is more obvious in newer films.
If by “UNIX time” you mean store timestamps as seconds (minus number-of-leap-seconds, currently 27) since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, that epoch is still technically defined in terms of the christian epoch, and, worse, it is also defined in terms of UTC which wasn’t even really standardized until 1972 and which periodically needs to have leap seconds inserted by the Earth Rotation Service. At least they have a cool logo:
We should probably just admit to the aliens that we didn’t even have a very precise definition of a “second” until 3 BUE (Before UNIX Era) but then we can tell them about TAI64, TAI64N, and TAI64NA and Circular T and then they’ll see that we’re at least starting to get serious.
It will be much easier if we can manage to abolish daylight savings time before we have to explain that too.
When the time comes, we’ll create or adopt a galactic calendar. Then set up a an equivalent/translation to one place in earth.
It’s not really worth changing the calendar system. There is a greater benefit in the calendar system being unified across the world, consistent, and stable, rather than the parts adding up perfectly and not being based on a certain culture or religion.
Has anyone ever come up with a sane time / calendar system?
@dessalines @cypherpunks
The simplest system may be 13 months of 28 days: every month has exactly 4 weeks, starting with a Monday and ending with a Sunday.
The l
365th day (and 366th in leap years) is a bonus day, a jolly outside of weeks, maybe a bank holiday.
Everyone is happy.
But maybe it doesn’t worth the effort to change a system which is the same in almost all the world, even with a simpler one
Except for nations and religions that celebrate their holidays on a 29th/30th/31st. And businesses because they like accounting in periods smaller than a year like quarters or semesters while 13 is a prime number (still possible but not really neat). Unfortunately.
I’d still root for the International Fixed Calendar though.
Hopefully, they just show up and blast us all.
They’ll probably build condos on the beaches after that, but no humans is a win.
I don’t sée any reason for aliens to have their shit together…
Yeah people humanize them way too much. They could be any number of ways, unintelligent, intelligent, have weird values, whatever.
Our timesystem has it’s oddities for sure but at least it’s pretty much the same all around the globe. There are no silly imperial units of time etc.
‘Why are you people not using Cubic Time? Is it not obvious enough?’
Unsure that everything is gonna be fine but the calendar.
This world has a dependency on slavery of non-human people, to the point that the average alien films is a representation of ourselves towards other species (we are really represented at some point as the aliens) but this is more obvious in newer films.
bro just use unix time smh my head 🥺
If by “UNIX time” you mean store timestamps as seconds (minus number-of-leap-seconds, currently 27) since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, that epoch is still technically defined in terms of the christian epoch, and, worse, it is also defined in terms of UTC which wasn’t even really standardized until 1972 and which periodically needs to have leap seconds inserted by the Earth Rotation Service. At least they have a cool logo:
We should probably just admit to the aliens that we didn’t even have a very precise definition of a “second” until 3 BUE (Before UNIX Era) but then we can tell them about TAI64, TAI64N, and TAI64NA and Circular T and then they’ll see that we’re at least starting to get serious.
It will be much easier if we can manage to abolish daylight savings time before we have to explain that too.
pretty sure unix time began with the creation of the universe in the 1970 🤨
Worse to explain our goverments.