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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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It is a curious thing - I think for the foreseeable future, we'd likely still track age via Earth years for the sake of avoiding this kind of thing. I wonder if/when we do colonize, how long would it take for the Martians to actually switch. How much would our cultures have drifted by that point?
And a related shower thought - until relatively recently (late 1960s), any definition we used to track time has been crazy localized to our planet, compared to other things in math and science where many of those concepts would still work the same elsewhere
A lot of science fiction writers try to address the problem of time when humanity becomes a space-faring race. Star Trek has the idea of a "Stardate" and instructed the script writers to just fucking make it up,
Meanwhile, Asimov in the Robots / Foundation universe, everyone still uses the idea of a 365-day / 24-hour day "year", even if no one remembers Earth (except a R. Daneel Olivaw and a few others).
And Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy does what OP notes -- Martian years are longer, and the societies diverge pretty rapidly, within a generation, for a whole host of reasons.
Whoa, that's fascinating. Thank you for all the great book recommendations!