MOSFET Dreams

3:42 Ante Meridian, Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-04:00).

After the aliens beamed me up into their flying saucer and strapped me into their intergalactic interrogation chair, they asked me what my name was. I told them, and the tall one checked something off on a clipboard he was holding. All at once the straps around my arms and legs released with a zip as they retracted like a loose seat belt.

“Sorry about the restraints,” said the tall one who was labeled A on his lab coat.

“We just had an incident yesterday where we zapped up the wrong person. Some sort of mix up”, he paused and looked at the other alien in the room, “What was it again? Coordinates were fucked or something. We accidentally picked up a random Italian lady who flipped out and attacked my partner here.”

“Don’t worry,” said the other alien, labeled B, “she was the only one we’ve had to throw out the back. You’ll probably make it back home in a bit. We just have some questions to ask you”

They remained sitting on the other side of the plain stainless steel table and tracked me with their headsets. And in case you were wondering, they were just normal looking aliens. Lanky, green, solid black eyes. Lab coats. Lasers.

“I’ll be honest I didn’t expect you guys to actually look like this, but let’s get started anyways,” I replied. “I’ve got to be home by 5, important dinner party.”

A glanced over at B and nodded. B looked back to me and began

“Welcome to our spaceship. We are aliens visiting your planet on an intergalactic census of all intelligent life. I, B, and my partner, A, have been assigned to the minus X minus Y plus Z quadrant of the universe.

We are interviewing 34 homo sapiens to gain insight in your ways of life. You are the 4th. Our previous interviews focused on earthly understanding of art, space, and nature, and were all conducted with field experts. Feel free to assume general knowledge of those subjects as being in our intelligence context.”

“In that order?” I asked

“Yes” said A

“Why?”

“Before we began the interviews we zapped up a person at random and asked them who the most important person was, then we zapped that person up and asked them to list out all major disciplines of study in order of importance. This way we would work our way through all of human knowledge in the way the most important person on Earth would”

“Who was the most important person?” I asked

“Jesus”

“Did you find him?”

B took the clipboard from the desk where A had set it down to write something down.

“Actually when we went to zap him up the computer found several. We selected the oldest one.”

“Got it,” I said. “So what are you guys interviewing me about anyways”

“Well you should know shouldn’t you,” said B looking up from his clipboard, sounding a little frustrated. “You’re supposed to be the best. Your discipline is human time.”

“Well I do consider myself a pretty avid time teller if I do say so myself,” I responded. Two score and four years ago I wrote the DATETIME kernel for JPL’s R5 comm network. I assume that’s why they chose me.

B finished filling out the paper on the clipboard and set it down. He pulled a little box out of his lab coat’s little breast pocket and clicked a little red button with little letters that read REC.

“So…”, began A. “What time is it?”

He stared intently at me. Simple enough though. I glanced down at my wrist watch

“3:51”

“Three fifty one?”, asked A. “So you use two numbers to represent time?”

“Well I suppose so”, I said.

B sat back in his chair and watched me intently.

“We have an hour number and minute number,” I continued. “You can add more numbers too if you like for seconds and such”

Now they both looked at me blankly. “Hours? Minutes?”

“Well hours minutes and seconds are some common human divisions of time. Seconds are smaller than minutes and minutes are smaller than hours, each by a factor of 60. So that makes 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour.”

They squinted at me. B looked back at what I assumed to be notes from previous interviews. “Humans do use base 10 right? Why 60.”

“What happened is that we used to use base-60 all the way back in ancient Babylon, I think around 1900 BC. So like 4000 years ago. Anyways, it stuck around, but we got rid of base-60 and now we need to use 1-indexed base-10 representations of the original format.”

“Par for the course,” said A. “Most beings we interview have base changes over time. But what’s that year thing? And what’s a BC?”

“Well I guess I didn’t really give you a full view of our time system. I said 3:51 but that’s just the time of day. Since there’s only two numbers there, they mean hour then minute, separated by a colon symbol. And like I said, once the minute number goes to 60, it resets to 0 and the hour number goes up by one. The day always starts at hour 0. The fun part is when the hour number gets up to 24. Then the hour number resets to 0 and we call that a new day.”

“24?”, asked B.

“Kind of. Actually I simplified earlier. A lot of people use the hour number the way I said above, but in some places we split our days into two halves of 12 hours and start at hour 12. Then we go to 1, 2, 3 etc. all the way till we get to 12 again, which is the middle of the day. We reset to 1 and continue until we hit 12 again, and voila, its another day.”

“So how is one supposed to know what is meant by 3:51?” asked A.

“Well we have suffixes for both of the halves, AM and PM respectively. Usually you can figure it out from context clues, but I guess we’re in a spaceship with no windows, sorry. Let me rephrase; It’s 3:51 PM. Oh well actually 3:55 PM now.”

“So it’s been 4 minutes since you said 3:51 the first time?”

“Yep”

“Interesting. How exactly are your time units defined? What are they relative to?”

I thought about it for a second.

“You aliens know about our solar system right?”

They nodded. “We’ve parameterized the orbital paths of several thousand bodies in your solar system”

“Well then you’ll see that the Earth spins a little bit, not in its orbit around the sun but on its own rotational axis. We call each full rotation a day.”

A nodded and took some more notes. “Wonderful! That makes sense. 24 hours is one 360 degree rotation of the Earth along its axis.” He looked over to B. “We can use that to translate hours minutes and seconds into our native alien time system.”

“Well actually I forgot to mention something. You need to compensate for the Earth’s travel around the sun. We don’t actually care about the Earth’s rotation relative to itself, so much as its local rotation relative to its normal vector facing the sun. In the time it takes the Earth to rotate 360 degrees, it has traveled millions of miles from where it started, so the angle that it needs to rotate to make itself face the Sun again is ever so slightly bigger, around 360.98 degrees.”

“Why the hell would you make it 360.98 degrees”

“Because the reason we have days is that the hours inside of them look the same on the surface from day to day. Well the Sun does at least. That’s why we need to align the rotation to the vector pointing at the Sun, and not relative to where the Earth used to be. Just think about it, if you were walking in a circle around a ball and trying to always face it, you’d have to keep rotating slowly to keep facing it right…”

“Uh huh,” said A and B.

“Yeah, so 360.98 degrees is just 360 plus the extra amount we already needed to rotate to stay facing the sun”

“Ok, so 24 hours is the time it takes the Earth to rotate 360.98 degrees around its axis?”

“Yeah pretty much. Anyways remember the year thing?”

“Yeah,” they said.

“So we keep traveling around the Sun in an orbit, and we call the amount of time it takes to get around the Sun a year. That means that our years end up being 365.242 days.”

“Interesting. So seconds minutes hours and days all fit into one another, and years are part of a separate system right?”

“Well.. No. We really want the Sun relative rotation to sync up with the Earth relative rotation because it ends up being useful to be able to have a whole number of days in a year. So what we do is just round it down, essentially creating two things; Something called a Calendar year, which has 365 days, and a Solar year, which is 365.242 days.”

“That’s almost a quarter of a day!” exclaimed A. “I could see this working out with a solar orbit a few orders of magnitude closer to a whole number than yours, but with your system, the progress along the orbit at which point a calendar and solar year are complete would end up being completely different after only hundreds of years!”

“Correct. The key word however is almost a quarter of a day. Julius Caesar saw this a long time ago and came up with the solution of adding an extra day to the calendar year every four years. That makes the average number of days in a year 365.25 you see? Much closer to the actual 365.242.”

“Still close to 0.1 days per year, and you guys have gone through a lot of those haven’t you,” quipped B.

“Yeah we have. So that’s Julian time, which after around 100 years is of having leap years, oh yeah leap years are just what we call 366 day years, after 100 years of Julian years, the Julian calendar year is almost a whole day behind solar years. So to fix this, a guy named Gregory made a new calendar called the Gregorian Calendar, which also by the way this is the one we actually still use so take notes on this one, who’s biggest difference was that every 100 years, we skip a leap year. But that wasn’t exactly good enough, because remember when I said around 100 years? Well it’s not actually 100 years it’s more like 128.04. So that means that if we skip a leap year every 100 years we’ll actually still be over doing it by just over 25%. So what we did is just said ok, skip a leap year every 100 years, except for every 400 years, skip skipping a leap year.”

“Wtf”

“I mean hey it actually kind of works, the Gregorian calendar averages 365.2425 days, and the real Solar year is 365.2422 days. So it takes over 7,000 Gregorian years for the calendar to fall one day out of sync with the Solar year. That’s long enough that we don’t worry about it that much.”

“Got it”, said A. “But let’s go back, I still don’t really get why you are so concerned with having the vector between the Earth and the sun be the same each day. After all that gives you the nasty 360.98 degrees, would it not be easier to just use the 360 degree relative full rotation?”

“Well the reason we do that is cause we want the sun to be in the same place in the sky from the perspective of someone on Earth at the same hour each day.”

B squinted a bit. “Wait a minute, our scan of Earth indicated that you guys live in multiple places on your planet and not just in one large mega city.”

“Yeah.. " I said, a little confused.

“Like.. multiple places pretty far away from each other. Different hemispheres even”, said A

“Ohhhhhh shit. Yeah. Sorry, forgot to mention this. So we got these things called time zones”

“Time zones?”

“Yeah basically we split up the world into little little vertical slices that have something called an offset”

“Oh that’s simple enough, you guys just make divisions that are one hour apart and then add that offset from a globally recognized location?”

“Not really, we mostly draw them based on countries and then chop them in half if they get too big”

“Ok.. I’ve heard of these ‘country’ things before, we’re talking to an anthropologist and historian tomorrow so don’t spoil anything”

“You got it.”

“Just one thing, what are the offsets relative to?”

“0 degrees longitude. We call it UTC, Coordinated Universal Time. Then we write offsets like UTC-4:00, with that for example meaning, the time right here is the time at 0 degrees longitude minus 4 hours.”

“One question,” said B. “Why the hell would you abbreviate Coordinated Universal Time as UTC. That’s wrong.”

“Yeah it’s kinda weird, we used to call it GMT for Greenwich Mean Time, because 0 degrees longitude lands on this place called Greenwich in London but I don’t know, we wanted it to be more ‘universal’ or something. We had to make a shitty abbreviation because the english abbreviation was CUT and the french one was TUC and neither of them wanted to just use the other’s language. So we had to compromise with an abbreviation that literally meant nothing in any language.”

“Weird,” said B

“Yep. Anything else you want to know?”

A looked over his notes. “Not really, let me just go over the different divisions, let me know if I missed anything. Second, Minute, Hour, Day, Year.”

“Well we have divisions smaller than a second, they just work like you’d expect thankfully. We named a lot of the lower orders of magnitude, like milli and nano seconds. Oh yeah and then we also have this other thing called a week. It’s just 7 days in a row. We use it to organize society but I’m sure your anthropology guy will tell you about that. Wait did I tell you guys about daylight savings time yet.”

“Nah”

“Damn ok. So remember those time zones? Basically some of them decide to change their UTC offset for part of the year”

“Why though”

“Well they like increase their offset by 1 hour for part of the year, spring and summer, and then bring it back to normal for the other part, fall and winter. Don’t worry about those things though.”

“But like why do they do that”

“I mean I don’t even really know. A lot of people started doing it a couple hundred years ago because they said it would make better use of the daylight and more recently we kind of began the process of stopping it. It’s pretty polarizing, in my country the population is fifty-fifty on abolishing it.”

A looked up from the clipboard. “All right. I think we understand now.”

B nodded. “So your people measure time using arbitrary segments rooted in ancient empires, approximate celestial motion to the same precision of fifth grade math class, and then use geopolitical boundaries that disrupt any semblance of temporal continuity between geographic locations”

A turned to B. “Sounds like a standard intelligent species to me. Mark their time keeping down as ‘adequately advanced.’”

B scribbled on the form. “Right beneath ‘mathematically masochistic.’”

And just like that I began to see my interviewers fade out of existence, as I was beamed back to Earth. Just before they were fully gone, I heard A mutter to B, “Shit, we forgot to ask him about BC didn’t we? And Jesus said something about an ‘April’ thing too”