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Standard Time Units
- 106 statements
- 19 feature instances
- 23 referencing feature instances
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This is a common Speculative Fiction trope. For reasons that should be obvious, planets have years and days of different lengths; months are entirely optional. But almost every sprawling galactic civilization runs on one set of standard time units, nominal years and days used for record-keeping. In universes where humans are a major colonial power, these units are often close to Earth days and years. When a traveler visits a planet that does not use standard time, the result is Two of Your Earth Minutes. Occasionally overlaps with Alternative Calendar, though many Alternative Calendars are restricted to a single world. If the units are given different names, they are Microts. Examples |
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2023-06-26T06:59:22Z | |
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Dropped link to ADeepnessInTheSky: Not an Item - UNKNOWN | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_247422c7 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_247422c7 | comment |
Most nations in the Honor Harrington series have their own local calendars, but use Earth's years (which they call "T years", like in Terra) for the recordkeeping and general communications. It helps that Earth is still around, and a capital of the largest single polity in the inhabited universe, thus conveniently avoiding the Insignificant Little Blue Planet trope. The only exception would be Protectorate of Grayson, which still uses standard Gregorian Calendar as their method of timekeeping, despite it having a little resemblance to the local orbital parameters, so they had to invent an imaginative way to cope with this problem. But then, their stubbornness is legendary. |
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| Standard Time Units / int_580a8972 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
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In Diaspora, the characters pin their clock time to real time by the 'tau', a subjective measure of time that depends on the power of the hardware they're running on and the relativistic effects of galactic travel. "Rushing," where the character runs their clock incredibly slowly to wait for the Universe to do interesting things in a short space of perceived time, is often used to make the cosmology useful to the plot. | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_6e1d5f36 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_6e1d5f36 | comment |
Farscape does it, though the units are a bit weird since the Translator Microbes don't do conversions. | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_76e67d86 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_76e67d86 | comment |
Although Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust is a distant prequel to the Foundation novels, at one point a character realizes he forgot to reset his watch to local planetary time from "Standard Interstellar Time", in which system "one hundred minutes made an hour and a thousand made a day". | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_7988cb68 | type |
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In the Mass Effect series, there are two time standards: Earth standard time, used by the Alliancenote Most time references in-game run on this system since the player character is an Alliance officer, and the Galactic Standard Time, which the rest of the galaxy goes by. In the Galactic Standard Time, a day is divided into 20 hours, each hour is 100 minutes long, and each minute is 100 seconds long. However, 1 galactic second is about twice as fast as 1 Earth second, so it's basically a 50-second minute, and the days would be 15% longer than an Earth day. For convenience's sake, the narrative goes by the Earth Standard Time. | |
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Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Acknowledged in the Frozen Teardrop novel, which takes place mostly on Mars. Time on Mars is measured according to a Martian calendar system, with years divided into eight seasons to roughly correlate with Earth's calendar (Mars's year is more or less twice as long as Earth's). | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_81692f99 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
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Star Trek, through Stardates. | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_8a39c411 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_8a39c411 | comment |
When one of the characters in Hyperion Cantos novels ends up travelling to Earth, which was not destroyed but moved, he expresses surprise that the day exactly corresponds to a 'standard' day in the WorldWeb, before realizing that the standard time measurements actually come from Old Earth. | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_a57cf54d | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_a57cf54d | comment |
In Darths & Droids, it becomes clear that the GM has not set up a standard calendar for the universe when everyone's debating whether Jim can use his Fate Manipulation ability again to avoid his character's death. This despite the Republic in Star Wars having using a standard calendar (based on the calendar of its central planet, Coruscant); of course, Jim's character did have to die in that scene. | |
| Standard Time Units / int_a57cf54d | featureApplicability |
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| Standard Time Units / int_aab32f7e | type |
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| Standard Time Units / int_aab32f7e | comment |
In Unity, the time units are Metric intervals based on the internal circadian period of the ship. A day is divided into 10 decs, which are in turn divided into 10 kaysecs, which are in turn divided into 10 centis of 100 seconds. On the other side, 5 days become a dec, and 5 decs become a round, as explained in the comments on this comic. | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_ac1d2fb5 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_ac1d2fb5 | comment |
In ARIA, Aqua (Mars) has its own calendar to represent that it has a different amount of days per year than Earth, but the series does use both that calendar and the standard Gregorian calendar. | |
| Standard Time Units / int_ac1d2fb5 | featureApplicability |
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| Standard Time Units / int_bcadd7cb | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_bcadd7cb | comment |
The Imperium of Warhammer 40,000 uses Earth years in a continuation of the Gregorian calendar, with the year nominally divided into 1,000 parts for record-keeping purposes. They do use a unique notation, though. Instead of "38,420 AD" they would write "420 M39," meaning 420th year, 39th millennium. There's also an official way of recording how accurate the date is considered to be (the vagaries of space travel and communication in the setting mean they're lucky of it's within ten years in many cases), but few authors bother with the whole 10 character date. An interesting variation is seen in one of the Ciaphas Cain books, with a planet that is tidally locked, meaning that the planet only rotates once in the time required to orbit the star. Since the ambient sunlight is constant for a given location and doesn't change based on the time of day the inhabitants don't use time zones and instead adopt a planet wide time so that everyone is awake or asleep at the same time worldwide. |
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| Standard Time Units / int_c3bf41a1 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_c3bf41a1 | comment |
Redshirts has universal time used on all Universal Union ships and bases, but it seems most planets keep some sort of local time since Dahl has to work out the time in Boston when calling an old friend from a distant space station. | |
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| Redshirts | hasFeature |
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| Standard Time Units / int_d461f757 | type |
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| Standard Time Units / int_d461f757 | comment |
Battlestar Galactica (2003) uses standard Earth units and 24-hour military time without explanation. The series takes place in the Neanderthal era, in a society that has no knowledge of the planet Earth, so the best possible explanation is that "standard Colonial time" just happens to exactly resemble Earth chronological conventions. | |
| Standard Time Units / int_d461f757 | featureApplicability |
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| Standard Time Units / int_e694aadb | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_e694aadb | comment |
An interesting variation is seen in one of the Ciaphas Cain books, with a planet that is tidally locked, meaning that the planet only rotates once in the time required to orbit the star. Since the ambient sunlight is constant for a given location and doesn't change based on the time of day the inhabitants don't use time zones and instead adopt a planet wide time so that everyone is awake or asleep at the same time worldwide. | |
| Standard Time Units / int_e694aadb | featureApplicability |
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| Ciaphas Cain | hasFeature |
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| Standard Time Units / int_ea787cd1 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_ea787cd1 | comment |
The drow of Menzoberranzen in the R.A. Salvatore Forgotten Realms novels still use hours, days, and years based on the sun for some reason, even going so far as to enchant a giant stone pillar to serve as an infrared sun surrogate. They don't have any contact with surface-going nations or any reason it would be necessary to synchronize with them. | |
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| Forgotten Realms | hasFeature |
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| Standard Time Units / int_f0047778 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_f0047778 | comment |
Void Dogs is set in deep space, so the issue of different planets having different day lengths hasn't been addressed. It's been hinted that the standard is actually a 28 hour day. | |
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| Standard Time Units / int_f01be35d | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_f01be35d | comment |
The lack of this is a serious problem on Gor, because it means that pinning down how long ago something happened is almost impossible. Most cities measure time by "when so-and-so was administrator", the desert people have proper calendars but those have years with differing lengths, only Ar counts time in a way that Tarl finds meaningful. | |
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| Gor | hasFeature |
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| Standard Time Units / int_f74b5f80 | type |
Standard Time Units | |
| Standard Time Units / int_f74b5f80 | comment |
The eponymous station in Babylon 5 uses 24 hour Earth days (measured in "Earth Standard Time", apparently Geneva time) and other units, as does the rest of EarthForce. Other races have their own sets of units, although most of them normally use human equivalent names when discussing time due to the nature of the station as being run by EarthForce. | |
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| Babylon 5 | hasFeature |
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