If a far future observer was to make any sense of a date, quite a lot would have to be known about the culture, including how to read its markings.
It would be impractical to carve a map of the sky showing the location of a stellar beacon on each tombstone, and then adding some number of rotations of the Earth around the sun to it. How would you describe leap seconds? Or seconds? The use of BC and AD pervades our culture. What's needed is a Rosetta Stone that has a lengthy description of the relation of astronomical events to the year 0, after first describing the time system (Y, M, D, H, M, S). Perhaps radioactive dating by isotope ratios would be easier than describing years, using a stellar event to pin down the base ratio to absolute time. Any understanding of a culture includes an understanding of its religions. Perhaps the Mayan calendar would be discovered first. Too bad it stops in December 2012. Bill Hawkins -----Original Message----- From: Raj Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 9:17 AM To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Time of death-Again T=0 could be a recent supernova for a secular short measurement span considering the life span of Earth. OR T=0 could also be a local solar system event that is easily determinable on Earth. For someone measuring events on Earth a million years from now, give or take a ppm :-) or they may not care! >I think this is a sort of relativity question, isn't it? That is, you just have to pick some place/time, and reference everything else to that. So which astronomical event do you want use as your reference (e.g. a T=0 epoch)and is it sufficiently well determined that you can figure it out later? It's all well and good, for instance, to use noon on January 1st, 1900 or something as your time zero, but that's hardly a universally available reference point. -- Raj, VU2ZAP Bangalore, India. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
