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I have always been interested intimekeeping. Maybe it stems from my confusion when I was a kid between dawn and dusk when they fell at the same (12-hour) clock times, and I awoke from a nap worried that I had missed my Saturday morning cartoons only to find it was still Friday night. Whenever that happened, I felt i had somehow been granted extra time to live, and it felt very good, as if I had cheated Father Time.
Since then I have always ben curious about other ways to measure time. Certainly I think everyone should use a 24-hour clock, and I wish there were more 24-hour watch faces (I keep my digital watch on a 24-hour display). I am a big fan of the World Calendar and the Holocene Era, and of re-dating every event in History to reflect them. For conversions, I favor the Julian Date system, though I know it's inadequate for some things.
Here are links to other chronobsessive sites on the net, as well as my own essays. Note that we time-nuts don't limit ourselves to Earth; Tom Gangale and others have invented clocks and calendars for Mars and other planets, and I myself have conceived a universal clock and calendar to be used in the absence of local natural cycles. The sky is no longer the limit.
For thousands of years there have been scores of different calendars, but the Julian Calendar is the one we know best. This one was implemented by dictator Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. (708 A.R.C.) as an improvement of the Roman Calendar, and after a transition year with 15 months - the longest year in recorded history. Imagine 15 sets of monthly bills in one year! To say nothing of the tax burden ...
The Gregorian Calendar was a refinement of Caesar's refinement, but is still pretty screwy. Recently, some people have proposed the World Calendar as a solution. Others favor a 13-Month Calendar. Still others would do away with the 7-day week altogether and use a 6-day week, which would really get people howling; two of these are the Millennial Calendar and the Fixed Week Calendar.
Noting that spring is the astronomical start of any year, some have proposed moving the official start of the year to the vernal equinox. My own Zodiac Calendar is of this type; in fact it was inspired by Robert Zubrin's calendar for Mars (see below).
Thomas Gangale's Martian Time Web page is chock full of clocks and calendars for Mars - which is pretty amazing, considering nobody has even gone there yet. I typed in his Martian standard Time article from the Journal Of The British Interplanetary Society without even knowing he was on the net. needless to say, when he wrote to me I was very pleased indeed!
Tom's site also has his own speculations on potential calendars for Jupiter's moons, which is pretty interesting, and links to other time sites (Martian and otherwise) on the net. If you want to know what time it is on Mars, here's where you should check.
While Earth, Mars and even Jupiter's moons have useable natural cycles, most moons and asteroids do not, nor does space itself. How will we tell time with no natural references? I believe the solution is Decimal Time, a way of marking time that will let people to interact without getting confused. It uses a standard we already have - the second - but applies it in a novel way.
Alphabetical List O' Links
this page has been visited times since April 1, 1998