Timekeeping on Mars

I enjoy learning about subjects that show me how arbitrary everything is that's been handed down to us by prophets and priests and kings and Microsoft and so forth. There is a sort of future shock that one can experience in this, to realize that most of the current underpinnings of culture are groundless and may as well be something else. Something better. One such subject is timekeeping. Before the Roman emperors started re-naming months after themselves, Rome had a consistent system for naming months. The Sept in September stands for 7, and Oct, Nov, and Dec mean 8, 9, and 10 respectively. "Ember" meant winter. This made more sense before somebody decreed that the month named after him (January) be bumped up two places to be the first, which made them really the 9th through 12th months, and they didn't get renamed because no emperor wanted to be last. Imagine we can start over on Mars. Here's a hypothetical system which happens to be a conglomeration of my favorite pieces from the systems currently devised by a wide variety of science fiction authors. You can read more about the available proposals on The Martian Time Survey. (Warning, some images of Mars personified are not work-safe.)( Read more... )