Sapphire
Poster
Posts: 48
Pronoun: she/her
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Post by Sapphire on Oct 24, 2015 21:18:00 GMT
I would like to collect information as to the chronology in the various worlds of the denizens of this forum.
(1) What are the units in your system of measuring time?
(2) How is the base unit in your system defined? (Some objective measurement, so that we can compare between worlds.)
(3) What is the current date and time in your world? (And how does this correspond to the date and time displayed on the forum, if your medium for accessing it displays such?)
(4) What is your age?
I will provide a sample response with my own answers:
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Post by Tama Eternal Stationmaster on Oct 24, 2015 22:22:15 GMT
(1) I measure time in seconds, minutes (60 seconds), hours (60 minutes), days (24 hours), weeks (7 days), and years (365.25 days). (2) Not sure how they define a second. I know that the a eternity is the time it takes from the world's creation, until the last spirit is sorted into their correct afterlife, which tends to be a few billions of years after the universe's heat death. That helps? (3) AD 2015, October 24th, 7:22. (4) You don't ask that to a lady.
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Post by Mother Starlight on Oct 26, 2015 15:11:40 GMT
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Ingram
Poster
Posts: 27
Pronoun: She
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Post by Ingram on Oct 26, 2015 18:19:05 GMT
Please don't make me talk about the OTC's internal time. It's a nightmare. We have a department of chronology for a reason: I just try not to think about it.
As for my age... It depends on what you're measuring. Let's use Terran units so as not to complicate things overly. If you're talking about 'how old do I look', my body is physically 26 Terran years old. If you're talking about 'how much time has my body experienced', my last replacement was about seventy years ago. If you're talking about 'how much time have you spent linearly in successive bodies, as seen by an outside observer', I'm about 200 years old. If you're talking about 'how much time have you subjectively experienced', I would estimate around 3000 years of selfstream. If you're talking about 'how much time has your collective self-tree experienced'... I'm not sure, but I would ballpark it as a five-figure number of years.
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Post by Astra Nephthys on Oct 26, 2015 18:32:07 GMT
This question doesn't translate, since I'm only really subject to chronology while I'm present in reality.
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Sapphire
Poster
Posts: 48
Pronoun: she/her
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Post by Sapphire on Oct 26, 2015 18:34:24 GMT
Please don't make me talk about the OTC's internal time. It's a nightmare. We have a department of chronology for a reason: I just try not to think about it.
...well, that's concerning. There's no risk of contamination via forum, is there? Steel will never let me live it down if I cause a temporal anomaly by chatting on a forum.
Do you have it under control? Do you need any help? I don't know if you're from one of those weird element-less worlds but if you're not then I can maybe put you in touch with them and if you are ... maybe we can send someone, I'm not sure how or if that would work, but we could try. Let me know. Yes -- I don't have the last two issues (I don't even know what a "selfstream" or "self-tree" is), but the first three affect me as well. I answered under interpretation #3.
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Post by Dr. Realist on Oct 26, 2015 18:35:26 GMT
I'm using Terran units at the moment. As for my age... Who knows? I certainly don't. Chronology is slippery enough just traveling between universes, let alone when you're somewhere as strange as the 45th world. If you asked me to guess, I'm less than a century old, but more than three decades.
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Ingram
Poster
Posts: 27
Pronoun: She
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Post by Ingram on Oct 26, 2015 18:57:22 GMT
Please don't make me talk about the OTC's internal time. It's a nightmare. We have a department of chronology for a reason: I just try not to think about it.
...well, that's concerning. There's no risk of contamination via forum, is there? Steel will never let me live it down if I cause a temporal anomaly by chatting on a forum.
Do you have it under control? Do you need any help? I don't know if you're from one of those weird element-less worlds but if you're not then I can maybe put you in touch with them and if you are ... maybe we can send someone, I'm not sure how or if that would work, but we could try. Let me know. Yes -- I don't have the last two issues (I don't even know what a "selfstream" or "self-tree" is), but the first three affect me as well. I answered under interpretation #3. Don't worry: the department of chronology exists to maintain sensible time across all OTC offices, and they are very good at their jobs. However, the explanation of how we manage this, given that not all the worlds we do business in are even causal...Yeah, no, I don't even know where to start. Plus, there's the issue with the first Chron being minted before OTC standardized on Terran time for the majority of its business, and so we maintain at least two internal calendars that I know of, with people running on different schedules depending on their offices - probably there are more than that, there's probably another cluster like the Earths somewhere where it makes sense to run an office on a third calendar - yeah, you see the problem. Generally, I don't worry about the details unless the people above me say I need to for a particular assignment. Usually that's because I'm talking to an office on a different calendar. Edit: As for 'selfstream' and 'self-tree': I have access to technology that allows me to copy myself. Thus, my existence in reality is tree-shaped, where the root is my birth. My 'selfstream' is the length of the tree from the root to the existence of me, as I am currently: the collective experience of everyone who identifies as 'me' is the length of the self-tree. Since I exist in parallel with myself, the subjective time experienced by my self-tree as-a-collective is therefore much longer than the time experienced by any individual self. A footnote: I'm not counting shared pasts multiple times here. Only unique experiences count towards the collective age of the self-tree as I'm defining it. (Experiencing the same event from different perspectives does count, though.)
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Post by Ka'te Maladaaas on Oct 26, 2015 19:19:22 GMT
Some of the people in my city talk about the sun sometimes, but I've never seen it. I don't really keep times: the humans in my sphere light the city with glass bowls of Joy, that they cover with blankets and things when they don't want light. They have a schedule, but I've never really learned it - oh, except that every four light-cycles (days?) they swap out who I get to talk to. That's always nice.
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Post by Lioncourt on Oct 26, 2015 19:47:07 GMT
We use 365-day years, 24-hour days, 60-minute hours, and 60-second minutes. One year is the period between the appearances of the Sage's Star just before sunrise. I realize this is probably a frustratingly local definition, but it's the best I have right now.
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Nick
Poster
Posts: 18
World: Cloudbank
Pronoun: He, his, etc.
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Post by Nick on Oct 27, 2015 5:07:31 GMT
Precise timekeeping is Lost Technology, and our planet doesn't have seasons per se, so we generally measure things by moonturns. On Cloudbank 60 seconds is a minute, 60 minutes is an hour, 25 hours is a day, 35 days and a couple of hours extra is a moonturn, and 10 moonturns is a year.
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Post by Come Forth Winter on Oct 27, 2015 18:16:11 GMT
(1) I measure time in seconds, minutes (60 seconds), hours (60 minutes), days (24 hours), weeks (7 days), and years (365.25 days). (2) One second is approximately "the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom" (3) The date at the time of writing is AD 2015, October 27th. My wristwatch says it around noon, but due to chrono-asynchrony it is likely to be wrong.
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