h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Actually, I'll have to go check the math on that. I THINK it'S right. Basically, their "midnight" will run 40 minutes behind the Earth one on the first day, 80 minutes behind on the second day, and so on...

The link is to a great animation of the mission. I'll try and get a link about the time study to post.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/video/animation.html


SC

And another thing....

Have you noticed that when you have a busy weekend, it seems longer than when you're just sitting around, "wasting" the day?

Or that your life flashes by faster the less of it you have left?

SC

It's well known that as you get older the time goes faster. I wonder what will happen when people start living well into their second century? If you reach 200 how fast will the time fly?


BTW does anyone else remember when a month seemed a long time and year lasted forever?

As if it were yesterday. It's the stuff *since* then I'm a bit hazy about.

So what's the point of living loads longer if all the extra years seem to flash by in minutes.

Gosh, is it that late already?

Noggin

No, you just forgot to change the clocks

Always learning something new at h2g2!

Yes, I knew our 'natural' day cycle was 24.6 hours as proven by some French spelunkers a long, long time ago, who stayed underground for a long, long time.

And yes, somewhere along the line I must have read that the Martian day was 24 hours and 40 minutes.

But I had never seen these two facts come together before as they did here in consectutive posts. And the collision of these two facts is quite disturbing.

Because, by my calculations 24.6 hours is pretty damn close to 24 hours and 40 minutes. One can only come to the obvious conclusion that we are all really Martians.

Well, glad that's settled.
Tea?

Now about this deja vu thing. Is it really just god hitting the reset button?


~jwf~

Your logic is impeccable, jwf.

But the real reason is tidal drag.

Noggin

Fish in women's clothing?

B

"Yes, I knew our 'natural' day cycle was 24.6 hours as proven by some French spelunkers a long, long time ago, who stayed underground for a long, long time."


Really? What's the e-dress of your miners?


I'd heard that, by using an atomic clock our day actually times out at about 23.97 of what we term "hours" per day. That might be wacky, though, since we seem to find an extra day every 4 years. An Earth year is 365.25 days long. since a Martian year is something like 687 of our days long, there's no where to go with that. Rotation is the only thing closely comparable.

However you decide to measure it(in a cave, on top of Everast, at the pole, au buffo, etc.), the rotational period of the Earth is 40 Earth time periods that we choose to call minutes shorter than the Martian rotation period. We got spin on 'em.

SC

"It's well known that as you get older the time goes faster. I wonder what will happen when people start living well into their second century? If you reach 200 how fast will the time fly?"

Maybe so fast, it wouldn't be worth it!


BTW does anyone else remember when a month seemed a long time and year lasted forever?"

As a matter of fact, I do.....I think I was 8!!!

SC

Backwards time travel and infinate possibilites are mutually exclusive. If you do not like the idea of determinism you must accept that it is impossible to travel backwards through time.

>> Really? What's the e-dress of your miners? <<

Ah, well.. y'see a long, long time ago, way back in the 20th century, before the glory days of google, information was found in books, magazines and newspaper articles. And a great deal of one's 'general knowledge' was simply 'anecdotal'.

Over a lifetime one would absorb all these little stories and later be able to recall only the major pertinent details; but none-the-less happily toss them into a conversation with at least some authority because, if one was confident they were true, it would be inevitable that some brainy type would have more information on the subject and be happy to confirm it all. Things have changed. Today people want URLs.

I have to say at least 98% of what 'I know' was absorbed before the coming of the great www. I recall this 'cave-dwelling-experiment' story as being from the late 60s or early 70s. It would have made page seven in a general newspaper or been the 'science' story on a TV newscast. It would not have been well known or repeated for three reasons: they were French, what they were doing was 'science' and their results could potentially disrupt the worker bee mentality of capitalist/democratic societies.

But as I recall they were mostly amateur 'cave climbers', students and scientists, who voluntarily locked themselves down a large and modern mine for several months to test the human clock. This was back at the beginning of the 'space age' and several other similar experiments in the effects of long term isolation have since been done in many places, by many nations. I believe David Blaine has just concluded his study into the effects of offending the British public by hanging around hungry in a glass box for 42 days.


~jwf~

I thought it was an experiment into baiting snipers

Time is waiting in the wings,
it speaks of senseless things,it's script is you and me.

Time is as I see it nonexistent.We all have been conditioned into believing in a manmade concept that governs our sad little lives.
Who needs it!

We are.
Ultimately we were.
Life is time,and one individuals life is just a blink in the eye of it.

My bad, jwf. I do remember that study, but since that one was an isolation study, it didn't connect.

I don't think it's the same as the current study on circadian rhythms.

The NASA one is to determine what it does to people to be slightly out of sync. Even shift workers are still on a 24 hour schedule; when they sleep during the day, it's during the same hours every day.

I heard a rumor that some people want to go to Mars someday, and NASA and ESA, etc. would like to know if that teeny time difference means they'll get the purple creeping crud or take up girl's field hockey without a space suit or something.....

SC

So it isn't just Mars and humans running on a different schedule, but the oceans too, as we observe how they slosh, slip and slide behind the faster moving earth's core, like clockwork.

Like us, the 'mother waters' are still more in harmony with where we come from than where we find ourselves now.


~jwf~

Then there is the fact that the Earth's actual period of rotation is not 24 hours, but 23 hours 56 minutes. This is the siderial day - the period of rotation against the background stars. Because the earth revolves around the sun, it takes another 4 minutes to be positioned properly with respect to the sun the day before.

"Backwards time travel and infinate possibilites are mutually exclusive."
I`m not so sure this is true. I read that a multi-dimension universe can do away with any paradoxes that could emerge with time-travel into our own past. There are two possibilties in resolving such paradoxes. The first is that the past is totally defined, i.e. everything that has happened or must happen, including the time traveler's attempt to kill his grandfather, cannot be altered and nothing will change the course of history. In other words, the time traveller will experience endless "mishaps" in trying to kill his grandfather and will never achieve the murder, thus keeping time (or at least events) intact. The second possibility is more complex and involves the quantum rules which govern the subatomic level of the universe. Put simply, when the time traveller kills the grandfather he immediately creates a new quantum universe, in essence a parallel universe where the young grandfather never existed and where our time traveller is never born. The original universe still remains. Stephen Hawking believes he can explain the origin of our universe in a variation of this parallel-worlds theme.
Superstring theories involve the idea of higher dimensional spaces: 10 dimensions for fermions and 26 dimensions for bosons. It has been suggested that there are the normal 4 space-time dimensions, with the extra dimensions being tightly 'curled' up. It has to be said, however, that there is no direct experimental evidence for superstrings. Yet. For further reading,`The Universe in a Nutshell` by S.Hawking. With a multi-dimensional Universe we have infinate possibilities.