Island A - warning long post

> Why use weeks, months, years, and a 24 hour day? In space, you don't
> need these time measurements. To wit:
>
> 24 hour day = rotation of the Earth
> week = a religion-based measurement (see Genesis)
> months = revolution of the Moon around the Earth
> years = revolution of Earth around the sun
>

Actually the fundamental standard unit of time in metric is the
second. My desktop clock shows the time in seconds since January 1, 1970
(POSIX time() standard). Currently the time is 988839309. It'll roll
over the 1 Gigasecond mark later this year - time for a party? Note that
100 ksec is almost 28 hours, so a day based on seconds and simple powers
of 10 would be a bit longer than the typical Earth day. I suspect that
once we're pretty well established in space, something like the POSIX
time() standard is going to have a lot more influence (all our computers
will use it) than traditional Earth-based measures of time, but no doubt
a lot of people will keep those around for another few centuries for
old-times sake :-) Humans on Mars for example would likely take to
non-Earth time measures out of defiance (if not convenience).

Metric time schemes based on Earth days or years make much less sense
from the space perspective than one based on seconds, in any case.

Arthur