Time

[Frozzy]

Re: Time

Originally posted by Spec
I have a question about time. I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Lets say humans populate a new planet. But that planet takes 36 hours to turn 360 degrees. That means that on that planet, they would have 36 hour days. Also, it could take 3-4-5 years for it to turn around the sun. So the years and hours, as we count them, would be completly different.

My question is, how would it work from planet to planet?

What if you lived on earth all your life, and when your 35, you decide to move to planet-x...In 3 years you'll be 36 or 39? And what about the people who were born on planet-X.

How do you think it would work? And what would be the legal drinking age, drivers liscence and so on?

Spec.

[Richelieu]

[Odin]

Originally posted by Spec
Ok, then what about days. TV schedule for example...Lets say a day on planet X last 43.42 earth hours...How would work days work? We still need 8 earth hours of sleep...How would the hours work for a customer service center for example?

That means we would never have the same amount of daylight every"earth"day...depending on when we eat/sleep/live/what we do...

Spec.

By the time we are advanced enough to travel to other planets it should be very easy to genetically engineer people's circadian cycles to fit to a different day and year lengths.

[Odin]

People would probably use local time on an everyday basis and Terran time when necessary as a "univesersal time."

[LordShiva]

Why would they use Tehran time?

[Jon Miller]

The resulting Persian dominance from Iran getting the bomb.

JM

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by LordShiva
Why would they use Tehran time?

Erm, what? He said Terran, not Tehran. Two very different words. Terran = Terra, one of many names for Earth. Luna = our Moon for instance.

edit: Didn't edit it quick enough...

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Erm, what? He said Terran, not Tehran. Two very different words. Terran = Terra, one of many names for Earth. Luna = our Moon for instance.

I guess I should have added a "" or a "" smilie

[Impaler[WrG]]

Read Foundation by Isac Asimov he predicted and solved this problem (along with the killer robot uprising) decades ago.

Your Hypotetical planet (lets call it Trantor for no particular reason) has a 36 hour rotation, but its not realy going to be 36 hours thats too improbable, more like 36.172 hours or something like that (130219.2 seconds). Now they just need to come up with a new local time unit to make things fit and hide that decimal point. Because seconds are so important in physics and math they wont touch them, Hours you want something nice and round and small. A local day of 31 hours with each hour being 70 minutes would be a very close, off by only 19 seconds which could be tacked onto the last hour of the day. Or they could deside to keep standard Earth hour and actualy have the 37th hour of the day be only 10 and a half minutes to eat up that .172 Or they could give New York a run for its money and make a Trantor minutes only 13.0219 seconds and have a 10 hour day and a 1000 minute hour.

Its rather arbitrary what unit of time is modified to, at a minimum either minutes or hours or both need to be modified to create something that will have resonence with the planets rotation. The year would probably be handled by counting days from the start of the Spring Solstus (assuming the planet has an axial tilt) for purposes of agriculture and other seasonal activities but dates and holidays would be peged to Earth probably even going to the trouble of correcting for the transmition time of light. So for example NewYears countdown would be at some different local day and time every year as would the begining and end of ever religious holiday. So for example the realy orthodox space Jews on Trantor would light their minora candles every 24 hours even though it will mean waking up in the middle of the night and such. Likewise Muslims would need to pray at all kinds of odd hours, Catholic would abstain from meat for arbitrary 12 hour periods over the course of 20 local days etc etc.

[Provost Harrison]

What if I have been in the US and my height is 67 inches and I then move to a European country. Does this mean I will only be 67cm tall and be an utter midget? I'm confused

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
Likewise Muslims would need to pray at all kinds of odd hours,

I bet figuring out which way Mecca is is going to be a tw@t of a problem. Will they have to prey on their backs facing upwards or something?

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison


I bet figuring out which way Mecca is is going to be a tw@t of a problem. Will they have to prey on their backs facing upwards or something?

Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca which indicates the way to go to Mecca. On a planet like Mars or Trantor, supposed to be developed, the direction of Mecca would be the direction of the closest space elevator.

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by DAVOUT


Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca which indicates the way to go to Mecca. On a planet like Mars or Trantor, supposed to be developed, the direction of Mecca would be the direction of the closest space elevator.

This question interested me and it seems it's more complicated then it seems.


This whole thing seems to completly contradicts what you said btw Davout.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibla

Because the Earth is almost a sphere, this is almost the same as saying that the qibla from a place is the direction in which a bird would start flying in order to get to the Kaaba by the shortest possible way.

In recent years, some Muslims from North America have argued that the traditional rule is nonsensical, because it leads to apparently absurd results. A Muslim praying from Alaska, they say, should pray almost due North if determining the qibla according to the traditional rule, because a plane going directly from Alaska to Mecca would take that route. Now, anybody who sees a Mercator projection map of the world can see plainly that Mecca is not North of Alaska, but rather to the southeast (or the southwest, depending on the map used). Therefore the "shortest travel distance" rule traditionally used in the old world makes no sense for North Americans.

These Muslims claim that the only correct way of determining the true qibla from a place is drawing a line from that place to Mecca in a Mercator projection map and that the fact that this line is not the shortest possible line has no relevance whatsoever to the matter.

The Muslim communities in North America are currently divided by the dispute: some of them pray to the Northeast according to the traditional doctrine, and some to the Southeast, according to the Mercator doctrine.

This dispute is far from trivial, because the fact that all Muslims pray towards the Kaaba is traditionally considered to be symbol of the unity of all Muslims worldwide under the law of God.

Most qibla calculating programs just use the traditional method and don't even mention the Mercator map method.

Future questions
In April of 2006, Angkasa, the Malaysian space agency, sponsored a conference of scientists and religious scholars to address the issue of how the qibla should be determined when one is in orbit; this is not merely a hypothetical question, since the Russian Federal Space Agency will be taking a Malaysian astronaut into orbit in 2007, and it is highly likely that this astronaut will be Muslim.

I'm not a Muslim but if I were, it seems I would be a traditional one.
Why would the Mercator projection tell you which pray instead of in which direction Mecca is closer?

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison


I bet figuring out which way Mecca is is going to be a tw@t of a problem. Will they have to prey on their backs facing upwards or something?

Dont want to be too serious about this issue but already on Earth, they pray in the direction of the direction of Mecca projected on a plane tangent to the Earth's surface where they are located.
Otherwise, they would have to pray "downward" most of the time.
So I assume the same "could" apply on another planet, although figure out the direction would change all the time and would be a heck of a problem to figure out.
As quoted in the earlier article, it seems the first Muslims in space are soon going to run into this problem so we'll see what happens

[DAVOUT]

If the theological meaning of praying toward the Kaaba is that it is the “symbol of the unity of all Muslims worldwide under the law of God”, there are several interesting consequences :
1. this obligation is of worldwide application, not “universewide”; on other planets other symbols can be defined;
2. The Mercator projection was invented in the 16th century and the Lambert projection in the 18th century, so we can consider that the Coran did not contemplated the difficulties resulting from multiple projections invented one thousand years later; and if the obligation is only a symbol, the unity must primarily be shown in all places where more than one Muslim are praying, without worrying in one place if other places have choosen another map projection.