Zefram wrote:
I hypothesise that a human civilisation entirely disconnected from natural diurnal cycles would use an artificial 100 ks cycle for this purpose, and a 1 Ms cycle as the analogue of our week.
A jejune (and rather moot) hypothesis. In such circumstances, why assume the existence of a week in the first place? Or the use of base 10 at all?
I'm not sure I want to encourage this thread :-) but the answer is precisely that you are positing a human enterprise. Merely by referring to "civilization", you are conjuring vast webs of connections to natural cycles at all scales. Even in an extreme "Caves of Steel" scenario, the troglodyte trillions are locked to diurnal cycles of solar power stations and the daily cadences of robotic combine harvesters to feed the buried billions, and even commerce with other star systems points to the rhythms of other suns
.
In the absence of days and years, though, calculations that involve only metric units are a lot easier than what we presently put up with.
Hence the prevalence of radians in everyday use :-) The only thing natural about the metric system is that humans have ten fingers and the quadrant of the Earth something approximating 10 megameters. That sexagesimal notation emerged from the fertile crescent merely attests to the notation's durability compared to the system debouched by the Reign of Terror.
Rob Seaman NOAO _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
