Time

[Garren]

Do you think it's weird that the Federation keeps standard time aboard vessels and stations such as 100 hours, 1200 hours, 2200 hours?

We keep track of time as it is relative to the cycle of the planet we live on. It's an obvious method of organizing our activities to measure our days.

But in space, where there is no cycle to keep track of, why use Earth hours? Why use a cyclical time system at all to track the on-goings of a star ship?

There are moments where a crewman asks another, "why are you up so late at night?" But there is no night or day on a star ship. Therefore, you cannot be "up late" because time would not be defined by the rise of the sun or moon.

Further, how are Star dates and years defined? A year is a complete rotation around the sun for a planet but a station or a starship is not bound by any rotations.

Maybe humans use Earth to help keep track of their own time but why would non-human crew be forced to keep track of time using conventional Earth standards? Why would Earth time mean anything to a Vulcan or a Klingon? Ocampa's only live 9 years, apparently, but is that Earth years or Ocampa years? What if Ocampa years are equal to 5 Earth years? So and Ocampa would actually live 45 years in Earth terms.

I know in DS9 the station seems to run on a 26 hour set up which shows that not everyone is forced to abide by Earth standard, but that's hardly stretching the imagination.

And would there be a need for a person to have an age if time was not measured by planetary cycles? I wonder if people would be defined as just infant, toddler, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, and elder.

btw: I know they did this just to keep things simple on the show but in reality, I wonder just how time really would be kept on a vessel such as the Enterprise or a station such a DS9?

Have I blown anyone's mind yet or has this been figured out already?

 

[Enterprise1701]

Earth is the Federation capital. I suppose that's the prime reason that Federation standards are (Western) human standards. I also suppose that for the sake of production convenience, it's unspoken that human schedules are the best balance for a mixture of Federation species.

 

[sojourner]

The human body evolved around a 24 hour cycle. It's best to keep to that cycle for health reasons.

As for measuring in years, well, it's easier to count larger units. You could just as easily ask why measure in hours? Why not use minutes? People could say "I'm 560000 minutes old", but it wouldn't really be as easy saying "I'm 25". (no, I didn't check to see if those two numbers actually work out)

Why Earth units of measurement? well, the show was made for Earth audiences.

 

[MacLeod]

Well in the case of DSN, it's a technically a Bajoran Station it's just adminsitered by the UFP.

As has already been pointed out Earth is the de facto capital of the UFP.

But doesn't it make sense to at least have a some sort of standard time for say your fleet. Look at time today we have different timezones but we do have a universal time UTC which the person in the street might know better as GMT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

 

[C.E. Evans]

Do you think it's weird that the Federation keeps standard time aboard vessels and stations such as 100 hours, 1200 hours, 2200 hours?

We keep track of time as it is relative to the cycle of the planet we live on. It's an obvious method of organizing our activities to measure our days.

But in space, where there is no cycle to keep track of, why use Earth hours? Why use a cyclical time system at all to track the on-goings of a star ship?

To better coordinates activities aboard the starship as well as to coordinate the starship with mission timetables assigned to it from home. With Starfleet HQ being based on Earth, it made sense to use an Earth-based clock. This would be true even for civilian ships from Earth, IMO.

Further, how are Star dates and years defined? A year is a complete rotation around the sun for a planet but a station or a starship is not bound by any rotations.

How stardates are determined has been a subject of frequent debate since day one in Trek, but during TNG it generally followed a "metric" approach of 1000 units being an Earth year, beginning around 2323 A.D. or so with different stardate systems being used prior to that (In the nuTrek movies, 1 unit seems equal to one Earth year or 365 subunits).

Measuring time in years, months, weeks, etc. still makes sense for people used to measuring time that way with stardates just being a different method of doing so.

Maybe humans use Earth to help keep track of their own time but why would non-human crew be forced to keep track of time using conventional Earth standards? Why would Earth time mean anything to a Vulcan or a Klingon?

Who says they do? Although I would argue that most of time, their terms of measuring time are simply converted into Earth terms via the universal translator.

btw: I know they did this just to keep things simple on the show but in reality, I wonder just how time really would be kept on a vessel such as the Enterprise or a station such a DS9?

They would probably just a pick a system that works best for everyone onboard or base the system on clocks back home (Earth for the Enterprise, or Bajor on DS9).

Have I blown anyone's mind yet or has this been figured out already?

Nah, this stuff has been thought of by countless people for decades...

 

[vulcan redshirt]

It is also sort of implied that other species in the Federation also come from planets with an approximate 24 hour cycle, which is unrealistic. It would have been nice if there was perhaps a mention of some crewman from 'whatever world' who has an unusual shift pattern because his homeworld's day is shorter and he needs to sleep shorter but more often, or another species who can work a couple of days straight, but is then out cold for a whole day.

Unless Federation medical science can align all crewmembers day-night cycles to an earth standard 24 hours

 

[Ithekro]

Didn't they do something like that with Phlox? His sleep cycle was rather short but specific.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

As for measuring in years, well, it's easier to count larger units. You could just as easily ask why measure in hours? Why not use minutes? People could say "I'm 560000 minutes old", but it wouldn't really be as easy saying "I'm 25". (no, I didn't check to see if those two numbers actually work out)

Curiosity got the best of me, and I came up with 13,141,000 minutes.

 

[SPCTRE]

Why Earth units of measurement? well, the show was made for Earth audiences.

Yup.

 

[Melakon]

One of the alien civilizations the NX encountered was offended that the ship wasn't synchronized to planetary time while in orbit.

 

[The Wormhole]

Didn't they do something like that with Phlox? His sleep cycle was rather short but specific.

Phlox only hibernates for something like six days a year, which we saw in Two Days and Two Nights. Presumably the hibernation cycle of every subsequent year happened off-camera, which is very possible. His hibernation the next year was presumably while the NX-01 was at Earth getting prepped for the Xindi mission, and the year after that while it was back at Earth being repaired after the Xindi mission.

 

[Garren]

Although I would argue that most of time, their terms of measuring time are simply converted into Earth terms via the universal translator.

Their terms may be redefined by a translator but if their planet cycles at a different speed in which seconds, minutes, hours, and days pass at a different rate than ours, then the translator can't do anything about that.

At some point a Vulcan is going to start wondering why his hour break is half the time of an Earth hour break (analogy assumes a Vulcan hour is less than an Earth hour for the purpose of this idea.)

So you have a multicultural ship, that should have multiple measurements of time. There would have to be a more universal way of tracking/coordinating time aboard a star ship.

Maybe they would, instead, measure time in beats or computer ticks? Maybe they have defined a cycle of time exclusive to the ship? But then, if you left the ship, the measurement of time would change based on the planet or station you were on.

So a year aboard a ship may only be three-quarters of a year aboard a station - ultimately I think time would become meaningless if you lived most of your life out in space like that.

 

[Tarek71]

Do you think it's weird that the Federation keeps standard time aboard vessels and stations

I assume Stardates are the universal Federation calendar. On any one member world, ship or station they may well have a clock that runs on their local time, with the cycles of day and night appropriate to that species.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Although I would argue that most of time, their terms of measuring time are simply converted into Earth terms via the universal translator.

Their terms may be redefined by a translator but if their planet cycles at a different speed in which seconds, minutes, hours, and days pass at a different rate than ours, then the translator can't do anything about that.

Sure it can by its very purpose of being a translator.

 

[Garren]

Although I would argue that most of time, their terms of measuring time are simply converted into Earth terms via the universal translator.

Their terms may be redefined by a translator but if their planet cycles at a different speed in which seconds, minutes, hours, and days pass at a different rate than ours, then the translator can't do anything about that.

Sure it can by its very purpose of being a translator.

It can bend time to the will of other time?

Or, do you mean the translator, instead, changes the Earth term hour into a Vulcan term that a Vulcan would understand in their own perception of time? Like an Earth hour could be 30 minutes on Vulcan so when a human says an hour the Vulcan hears 30 minutes maybe... I guess .. my head.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Bajor has a 26 hour cycle.

It would have been nice if they had some lines here and there "Oh, Lt Kallaf has a 52 hour sleep cycle, so he will work alph and beta shift every other day. Ensign Rikta has an 8 hour sleep cycle so she will work the first three hours of each shift."

 

[C.E. Evans]

Their terms may be redefined by a translator but if their planet cycles at a different speed in which seconds, minutes, hours, and days pass at a different rate than ours, then the translator can't do anything about that.

Sure it can by its very purpose of being a translator.

It can bend time to the will of other time?

Nope.

Or, do you mean the translator, instead, changes the Earth term hour into a Vulcan term that a Vulcan would understand in their own perception of time?

This.

 

[Timo]

Yup. Things like "hour" and "minute" have no basis for existence other than human agreement. There's no natural phenomenon corresponding to "hour" on Earth, no phenomenon corresponding to "minute", none to "second". There wouldn't be on Vulcan or Betazed, either. Now "month" is theoretically based on the orbit of Earth's Moon around the mother planet, but only theoretically; the cycle of months has nothing to do with the Moon nowadays.

Only "year" is a unit derived from the real world, so to speak - from Earth's orbit around the Sun - and therefore a Vulcan aboard an Earth vessel orbiting Betazed saying "year" might need to specify whether he means a Vulcan year, an Earth year or a Betazed year, as each planet presumably has a different orbit (but supposedly only slightly so, because the native species are virtually identical and would need virtually identical planets in order to survive, let alone evolve).

But that's a dialogue problem that would seldom come up. Our heroes and villains frequently discuss ETAs and countdowns, and when that happens, they use hours, minutes and seconds - which we can safely assume to be Earth units, and more specifically 21st century English units, as everything is being translated for the benefit of the English-speaking audience. (For all we know, Jim Kirk or Ben Sisko speaks a future language only distantly related to English and uses futuristic units...). If "Klingon minutes" somehow existed and were used, this would need to be specified, because confusion with units can foul up a countdown and cost lives - but this very fact suggests that "Klingon minutes" don't exist and are never used, or else our heroes and villains would be specific about them.

In contrast, there's basically never anything pressing or crucial about the use of "years". After all, with years, there's no hurry... So the occasional use of Vulcan years without specific mention is perfectly all right, and we can assume it to happen when we find it convenient to interpret certain dialogue in a certain way.

Now, "seconds" are a special case - those are a standardized unit on which the entire concept of physics on Earth is dependent. There can never be a "local second", or all science and engineering as we know it will collapse. But one day, colonists from Earth might decide that Mars has exactly 24 hours per day (or perhaps 93 if they so fancy), and they'd need to redefine "hour" for that to happen. They are free to do so. They'd then need to redefine minute if they want sixty of them per their hour, and there'd be hell to pay if they redefined second so that they could have sixty of them in their minute. But as far as we know, this doesn't happen in Star Trek. All hours are Earth hours.

Perhaps even the Bajoran ones... We have never seen a Bajoran clock up close, after all, and don't know how they measure time. Dialogue doesn't help there, because it's being translated for us anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

In the episode Where No One has Gone Before, Data said of a subspace message to Starfleet "they should receive in fifty-one years, ten months nine weeks, sixteen days ..."

So in the 24th century, their calendar has more than ten months in a year, more than nine weeks to a month, and more than sixteen days to a week.

In Yesteryear, Spock told the Guardian "I wish to visit the planet Vulcan, thirty years past, the month of Tasmeen. Using (presumably) the Vulcan name for the month.

I know in DS9 the station seems to run on a 26 hour set up which shows that not everyone is forced to abide by Earth standard, but that's hardly stretching the imagination.

If the Bajorian day was 70 hour long, I doubt the Humans (for one) aboard the space station would be following that day. Sisko and others might have continued to observe a 24 hour day, "losing" 2 hours every Bajorian day. This would have kept them synched with Starfleet time.

 

[Timo]

In the episode Where No One has Gone Before, Data said of a subspace message to Starfleet "they should receive in fifty-one years, ten months nine weeks, sixteen days ..."

So in the 24th century, their calendar has more than ten months in a year, more than nine weeks to a month, and more than sixteen days to a week.

That, or then Data was listing a range of options, none of them particularly realistic - the 51-year-10-months scenario, the nine-week scenario, the sixteen-day scenario, and something else Picard had no patience for.

In Yesteryear, Spock told the Guardian "I wish to visit the planet Vulcan, thirty years past, the month of Tasmeen. Using (presumably) the Vulcan name for the month.

Which is fun in itself, as Vulcan supposedly has no moon.

Then again, both that episode and the first movie feature heavenly bodies on Vulcan's sky. If those aren't moons, then perhaps sister planets? Possibly living on twin planets is a Vulcanoid thing, and dictated the Romulan choice of new home as well?

I wonder which are longer, Vulcan years or Vulcan months?

Timo Saloniemi