Hacker News Reader

Clearly we should just use seconds, hectoseconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds, and stop worrying about whether our time lines up with the celestial movements.

View on HN

The books Fire Upon the Deep use seconds like that, no hours or days or weeks, just larger 10x multiples of seconds.

And here I thought maybe time zero would be the big bang, but alas, that is too celestial, so I guess January 1st, 1970 it is. Or whatever that is in the metric calendar (10 months per year, 10 days/week, 100 days/month)

It's a bit difficult to use the Big Bang as time zero when the current uncertainty of when it actually happened ±0.02 billion years, which is what, a thousand times longer than all of recorded human history.

We could use the birth date of that jewish prophet, except we'd still be off by a few years. Oh well, in a few centuries no one will care, and we'll just use Unix Epoch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com