Mar 18, 17 / Ari 21, 01 01:42 UTC

A science based alternative to the (proposed) Asgardian calendar  

I have made no secret of my dislike of the idea of the Asgardian calendar presented in Decree N2. I am still waiting for a logical and/or scientific argument to be presented as to why this calendar will serve Asgardia better at this point in time than the currently broadly accepted Gregorian calendar. However, I have spent enough time registering my disdain for this idea, so I thought I would propose a science based alternative.

By no means do I profess that this is a complete idea - more of a working concept to be built upon by those with far extensive knowledge than me in the fields of astronomy and relativity.

Pulsars, as I'm sure some of you already know, are fast rotating neutron stars / white dwarf stars that emit a concentrated streams of electromagnetic radiation, much like a lighthouse. The rotational period of a pulsar is very short and regular, however, not completely precise. There is a specific type of pulsar, called milisecond pulsars, that (as the name suggests) have an extremely rapid rotation and much higher precision. By combining the measurements from several millisecond pulsars, you can create an array that can account for the various sources of variation / error and create a "clock" that has an accuracy that rivals atomic clocks which can be calibrated to any existing standard measure of time (for example, the existing TT(BIPM11) standard).

Using this method, you can still designate 0:00 hours on 1 January 2017 as T=0 and build any construct of time you want around this - base 10, hexidecimal, base 27, base 60, stardate, whatever tickles your fancy. There would be no need to incorporate leap years, leap seconds, year days, etc as this measurement is not related to the motion of the Earth through space. I would suggest though that whatever system is chosen, a "day" would still have to be close to 24 Earth hours since humans have evolved to operate optimally on this timeframe. This new time system could then be related back to "Earth time" by use of a simple algorithm.

So you're all probably thinking "So what? This is just another way to measure time." However, there are two distinct advantages of a space faring nation measuring time this way.

  1. You may also be able to create an in-built Galactic Positioning System - The GPS in your car and smart phone measures time delay among a series of satellites to pinpoint your location on Earth. If there was a wide enough spread of reference millisecond pulsars, it is possible (at least in theory) to apply the same technique and pinpoint your location in the galaxy. NASA is working on such a system right now and plans to test it with the NICER/SEXTANT mission slated for the ISS this year.

  2. You can account for the relativistic effects of long / fast space travel - Knowing the position and orbital period of a wide spread of pulsars provides many external frames of references. This can allow for time dilation effects to be measured and accounted, allowing space habitats / vessels to run two clocks: a "local" time and an Earth reference time. In LEO or even in low speed (relative to the speed of light) excursions into our solar system, this discrepancy is going to be small. However, when we do crack a way for travelling at speeds greater than 1/2c, this method will allow the occupants of that ship to keep an accurate track of "Terra Time".

So there it is, my concept for an alternative way of measuring time - A little more sophisticated than a tweaked version of an Egyptian sundial. Let the discussion begin!

  Updated  on Mar 18, 17 / Ari 21, 01 03:04 UTC, Total number of edits: 1 time

Mar 20, 17 / Ari 23, 01 17:43 UTC

I'm not a scientist but I agree with your idea that a new calendar, even if good looking, shouldn't be Earth related if we're trying to achieve a space related one: our (future) calendar will have an exchange with Earth one, so that one could say "1st Asgard 1 AD (Asgard Date) is 18 june 2017 ED (Earth Date)", as we'll need to keep in touch with the Earth even in the (close) future.
28 (Earth) days, 12 of 13 (Earth) months, it seems way too Earth centric to me too, even if I'm unable to propose a better one.
It's correct, at least for now, to rely to the 24hours time-frame, even if we can call it in another way, e.g. modifying the hours, minutes and seconds' length to have "1.000.000 seconds a day, or 10.000 minutes/day, or 100 hours/day" in the same time-frame. After that, we're not forced to keep the "Earth year time-frame" as our territory will (hopefully) be in the space, with a rotational period probably different from Earth's one.

  Last edited by:  Luca Coianiz (Asgardian)  on Mar 27, 17 / Tau 02, 01 14:10 UTC, Total number of edits: 2 times
Reason: EyeR clarification on Asgardia's 1st year

Mar 20, 17 / Ari 23, 01 18:48 UTC

1st Asgard 2017 AD (Asgard Date)

Nope. 1'st Asgard 01. The 2017 is from the Gregorian.

Mar 21, 17 / Ari 24, 01 15:31 UTC

As we're here, I would suggest to adhere to ISO 8601 "Representation of dates and times" [1], so to have a more "mathematical" representation of the time flow.
In this way, 24 March 1 AD should be written as 0001-03-24 (or, more compact format, 10324) with most significant numbers to the left, and all the numbers zero-padded to their maximum length.
ISO 8601 expects 4 numbers for the year but, as the MSN are left positioned, it can be compressed or extended at need (someone will do after 9999-13-28 I bet ;-)).
All this should involve time also, in the hh-mm-ss.sss (or hhmmss.sss) format which, if referred to UTC [2], should end with "Z". This way 16:22:36 CET will become 152236Z and the full actual date can be written as 00010324-152236Z (or, for pratical uses, 10324-1522).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

Apr 24, 17 / Gem 02, 01 06:24 UTC

Unfortunately the longer the rotational period of the pulsar, the higher the likely error from slight rotational irregularities. Millisecond period pulsars can be measured to a high degree of accuracy with current instuments and computing.