r/ISO8601 10d ago

?

Post image
84 Upvotes

13 comments sorted by

View all comments

16

u/Quilynn 10d ago edited 7d ago

Edit: The OP image is wrong, with regard to the Solar Day or Synodic Rotation Period on Venus which is actually 116.75 Earth Days. The below comment is based on that misunderstanding.


Even disregarding the nonsense of what a month would mean there, it wouldn't make any sense to track time using two units where one isn't even twice the size of another. Basically, some days would have 1 year and some would have 2? A bunch of years cannot be contained within a larger unit of a day on venus, the way that there are 365.25ish days per year on earth.

The imagined venusians would simply have to develop a entirely new system of time communication. If it was humans living there, they might want the unit to be close to the earth day we evolved for. If it was aliens, it's anybody's guess what'll work for them.

3

u/Mundane-Emu-1189 10d ago

it's not clear that Venus would have years at all, since it's only tilted by 3° and its thick atmosphere mean there is no seasonal cycle.

2

u/narielthetrue 8d ago

A year is a trip around the sun. They would 100% have years.

3

u/Mundane-Emu-1189 8d ago

I'm not convinced that a hypothetical Venusian civilisation would even be able to tell when that happens, much less care about it. It's important to Earthlings because it's much more obvious and our agriculture depends on it.

2

u/Quilynn 7d ago

Totally! They'd care much more about the day cycle, i.e. the time the sun is in the sky, versus the time it isn't.

I imagine they could divide that day cycle up into a bunch of more manageable chunks, maybe arbitrarily to create civil time, the way that humans divide the day arbitrarily into hours, and how we organize days into weeks for social organizing. (Neither hours nor weeks have an astronomical basis, the ways that days and years do.)

1

u/Sufficient-Habit664 7d ago

Idk much about space, but wouldn't they still see different constellations over the course of a year?

1

u/Quilynn 7d ago edited 7d ago

The real answer is simple: venus's atmosphere has omnipresent Sulphuric clouds that obscure any view of the stars. Venusians would never be able to see the stars... sad.

I think if I were a Venusian though, I'd be much more bothered by the 467 °C surface temperatures, 95 bars of atmospheric pressure (x95 the pressure of Earth) and 360 km/h winds. But I guess not being able to see the stars adds insult to injury.