Ancestors

Toot

Written by Stuart Langridge on 2025-01-12 at 15:48

Random thought for a sci-fi story: if one were to run into a civilisation of roughly human physical proportions, they might measure distance in "lins", meaning "light-nanoseconds". This seems like a very sciency futuristic sort of thing to do. But one light-nanosecond is really, really close to 1 foot, which is a very conveniently-sized unit if you're about human sized!

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Descendants

Written by James Henstridge on 2025-01-12 at 15:55

@sil so they don't use any Earth units to measure space, but they do use Earth units to measure time?

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Written by Stuart Langridge on 2025-01-12 at 15:55

@jamesh ok this is a reasonable point :)

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Written by James Henstridge on 2025-01-12 at 16:03

@sil ignoring that issue, what would it say about a society if their customary distance units were invented after they discovered the speed of light?

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Written by Stuart Langridge on 2025-01-12 at 16:05

@jamesh I am imagining that they ruthlessly discarded all the previous units and properly embraced something new. Which is... a bit of a reach, I admit it, but it's quite likely that they'd have had a unit roughly a foot in size 'cos it makes a lot of anthropocentric sense, I think

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Written by Tarus BALOG on 2025-01-12 at 15:59

@sil I dunno:

"I made the Kessel run in 12.34533e+17 lins"

doesn't have the same ring to it (grin)

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Written by Marcos Dione on 2025-01-12 at 16:09

@sil I read a book that measured time in seconds. Anything beyond 1h became incomprehensible, to the point that the protagonists kept mentioning the equivalent in days, week, months and years.

Luckily, once you ignored the references to time, the book was pretty good. Like with 100 Years of Solitude and names :)

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Written by penguin42 on 2025-01-12 at 16:33

@sil I think the problem is the nanosecond is fairly arbitrary.

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Written by Matt Wilcox on 2025-01-12 at 17:19

@sil Now throw a spanner in the works and have them marine based; where the speed of light is slower.

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Written by John Colagioia on 2025-01-12 at 22:12

@sil The Pioneer and Voyager plaques use the the hydrogen line (and the electron spin-flip causing it) for time and distance. For time, you get a hilariously tiny clock-tick, but the wavelength coincidentally comes to a little over eight inches.

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Written by Stuart Langridge on 2025-01-12 at 22:27

@jcolag useful!

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