Agreed that the hours are likely to be Earth ones. An hour is short enough a unit to be relevant for deadlines: if something is going to happen in "72 hours", our human heroes must know it's more or less exactly 72 Earth hours and not, say, ca. 69 Earth hours which matches 72 local hours (as the only real way to get around the potential for confusion would be to call the Bajoran units of time by some other name, preferably the local one, and we never get that). The same goes double for minutes and triple for seconds.
OTOH, a month may well be a local unit of time more often than not, and a year could easily be that without saying. Nobody's lives would depend on the heroes getting the "wrong" type of year at first, because there would by definition be plenty of time to get it straightened out. Also, years and often also months would be defined by local astronomical phenomena - "once around the star", "the (biggest, brightest, whatever) moon goes around once" - rather than arbitrarily related to Earth units.
By these tokens, it's extremely unlikely that the Bajoran day is exactly 26 hours long, given that it's Bajor and those are Earth hours - but also unlikely that it would significantly differ from 26 Earth hours or else there would be complications that would warrant the occasional bit of dialogue. Also, I guess humans would have the nicest sort of precedent from having operated with the Martian day cycle that differs minimally from Earth's but nevertheless differs!
As for humans adapting, there's plenty of data on slightly longer work/rest cycles being okay with human physiology and psyche, and of daylight/darkness cycles being essentially irrelevant. We also know that 4 hours of rest followed by 4 hours of work is okay, as sailors of yore have lived by such "day cycles" easily enough. What remains to be seen is how long a cycle we could adapt to, given enough adaptation time and the proper chemical aids.
Timo Saloniemi
