What would our calendars be like with no astronomical cycles? [duplicate]

Question

What would calendars and our concept of time be like if there were no astronomical cues? If we lived in perpetual daylight and perpetual summer. The Sun, Moon, and stars are all fixed in the sky. There's no tides, no seasons, no night. No physical cycles.

What would it look like at various stages of technological evolution? Hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial, information. What would each need to keep track of without tides, seasons, and night, and how would they keep track?

This is an exercise in removing the astronomical cycles from time-keeping and seeing what's left. Don't worry about the rest, physics implications, how humans evolved, etc... Think of it like a video game, or an RPG setting where it always seems to be the same time of day and the same season; where the world is flat and surrounded by an impassible ocean.

What other cycles are available? Humans and animals still need sleep, but on what cycle? Without seasons, will animals still migrate on a regular cycle in search of food? Crops have a fairly fixed time between being sown and being harvested, will that need time-keeping, or will "the corn looks ready to harvest" be enough?

How do people coordinate in space and time? How do people know when to meet to work or build or socialize or gather an army? When railroads are invented, how do they make their schedules?

Answer 1

At the risk of appearing flip, I don't think you WOULD have a Calendar in the scenario you described. The whole concept of a calendars grew from the requirement to predict in advance when seasons were going to change for agricultural and pastoral purposes. Without seasons, there's no external structure on which to build one and, more importantly, no reason I can think of for anybody to want one. Not a universally applied one, at any rate.

What you might have is certain professions having calendars for specific purposes, but they'd all be different, to fit very specialized needs, and there wouldn't be any incentive for anybody outside those professions to adopt them.

An example that comes to mind offhand might be fishermen. Although you don't have seasons, you WOULD have ocean currents driven by the Coriolis force and by temperature variations between tropical and arctic latitudes. Although without seasons there's no reason for birds to migrate, you would still have migratory whales and fish that breed and give birth in warm waters, and feed in colder waters which tend to have more abundance of food. These creatures could have migratory patterns driven by their own life cycles, and fishermen would need to know in advance when to go looking for them.

Answer 2

Graduated candles, water clocks, and eventually mechanical clocks. What time periods they choose are arbitrary. Their equivalents of seconds, minutes, hours and days will be divided up differently than ours. They will likely divide their time based on their sleep cycles, so their "day" would be about as long as ours. But their "hours" "minutes" and "seconds" are arbitrary. They will have a class of people whose job it is to make sure the clocks run smoothly. Who light new graduated candles, refill water clocks, and wind up mechanical clocks. This is good enough for scheduling purposes, it doesn't really matter much if a few minutes get added or lost here and there. There's no solar time to contradict social time, so it'll be difficult to really notice.

Answer 3

I'd posit that people in such a world would have no need for calendars at all (not even fishermen) because they most likely have no broad sense of time passing.

Since all lifeforms in this world have evolved within this world since its Beginning, there are no light & dark photosynthetis, no nocturnal animals and no predictable patterns in Nature. All animals and peoples in this world are dirunal by nature. They sleep when they're tired; they wake up when they're rested. Plants do everything during light photosynthesis.

Re fishermen: I don't think they could devise a calendar because they have no sense of time to compare the migrations of fishes in the sea to. No reference points, you see. For us, all we have to do is keep track of the number of sunrises and within a couple three years you can devise a fairly accurate calendar that accounts for lunar cycles, seasons, years, weather trends, migrations and the like. They have no days to count and no external cycles to compare events with. They might notice that there are fishing expeditions that bring back a good catch of that fish, and other expeditions that don't bring back such a nice catch. But they wouldn't be able to express the stretches of time that form the intervals.

This means that other rhythmic events (heartbeat being probably the most reliable) will also not be expressible in terms of time.

I suspect that not only will they have no calendars, but also that their music would be non-rhythmic, perhaps sort of like the music of a wind chime or aeolian harp; and that their languages will have no tenses (past, future, etc., because all experience is NOW, an ever-present and timeless time; there will certainly be no temporal idioms.

If they had a calendar, you know, with like pithy wise sayings for every day, it would look like this:

Yep. Every page identical with the word "NOW" written on it; every day the same pithy wise saying: "Be Happy NOW".

Answer 4

They would be keeping track of the timing of something that is critical to their way of life or even their survival. Some possible divisions would be related to their major crop lifecycles or the migration patterns of their major prey animals. Edit-- The gestation period of the people would also make a handy cycle.