Is it plausible for a world without an external universe to develop a year system?

Question

I'm currently in the phase of planning a time system for my world and I am starting to run into logistical issues.

My world essentially is an island in an endless ocean. No universe, no rotation of sun nor planet (there is no planet, it's essentially a flat endless plane).

I have a pretty solid explanation for days (god of light, human punishment, lore blah blah blah) but I want to have a better time keeping system than just counting days (Saying day 1086312 obviously would be a pain).

However I can't think of a plausible way to have a year system, as there is really no marker to base it off of. Is it plausible that someone just decided to mark a year every 360 days, or would there be a better solution?

Edit: I should probably note that there is often no change between days, and so time-keeping based on weather, temperature, tide, wind, or anything along those lines would not make sense as they are the exact same every day.

Answer 1

Frame Challenge: Why do you need a year / calendar system? Perhaps your people don't care about time? What are they measuring time for? Aron says that for us:

The calendar was invented due to the need to plan agriculture.

Is that a concern in your world?

But for a actual calendar method, how about:

And smaller timescales than the multiple decades of a ruler's rule could be split into fortnights or something, so instead of saying 1086312 days, you could say... 72420 fortnights?

But if the numeral system is in 10s, you could use powers of ten as your week, "month", "year" notation. 1086312 is 1086 "years", 3 "months", 1 week and 2 days.

Answer 2

You ask if it is plausible to develop the concept of a year. Calendars were made because there's a need to keep track of time due to argicultral, astronomical or religious reasons.

As you said in your edit, your world has no stars and planets, no seasons and everyday is the same, but there is religion (God of Light, punishment for humans).

Then you can have a calendar related to relgious ideas. A week is 10 days because that's how long God took to create the world, 1200 days after creation of the world, God defeated the Devil and that's why it is celebreated as 1 year, etc.

Answer 3

2 forms of options come to mind, natural cycles or manmade cycles.

Natural Cycles
Several common timings (years, days) com from natural phenomena. Rotation around the sun and the rotation of the earth. But these phenomena don't exist in your world, instead if the most common crop has a regular period (going from seed to harvest) then this could develop into a timing cycle. Any other natural process that forms a cycle could also be used for timing.

Manmade Cycles
There are several possible origins for manmade timing cycles, and they are adaptable to what ever time frame you need. Simplest I could think of depends on what base number system (like binary) they use, and you get "weeks" from when the number of days forms an interesting number. for example if they use base 10 (normal numbers) then you get "weeks" every 10 days.

This works better if you use a higher base system, for example if they use base 60 like the babylonians, which is where we get 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a hour. Then when express the number of days (in base 60) you could have the first digit as being number of days the second digit as being number of months... using this system you would be able to express an entire 7 billion years in 7 digits (less digits than our date/time format, dd/mm/yyyy)

But that system doesn't work as well for shorter times, also you have to have 60 different digits, a better system could be using base 16. In this system the number of days is the first digit the second digit is roughly the number of fortnights. The third digit is roughly the number of years, the fourth digit is the number of decades, fifth is the number of centuries. You would only need a number 5 digits long to express the current date in this form.

And like how we would respond to "how old are you", "60", instead it would be "I'm 15 hundred", where the implied units are days instead of years.

hope fully that helps

Answer 4

This is a tricky one, but perhaps a year based on the passing of the generations? A new year could start when the first born child of the ruling/head/royal family is born/passes initiation into adulthood/etc and the year ends when the next generation reaches the same period, perhaps with some intercalary time (during the period of initiation for example).

I think menstrual cycles as suggested in the comments are a good idea as well, you could surely change the length if you wanted a longer year. If that's a mildly taboo subject for you, you could invent some other biological cycle, maybe the beings go through periods of salt-accumulation in their tissue followed by a period of purging.

I thought also perhaps random-periodic weather events, for example if there are roughly storms every 1-3 months, perhaps after 5 or 6 storms the elder/timewatcher/youngest child decides that a year has passed. You could also end your years after ended by major events like wars or migrations or whatever. This would cause problems if your world isn't big or centralised though.

Answer 5

Convergences of independent cycles

In the real world, there are some species of cicadas that have evolved to only emerge after a prime number of years. As the article points out, species that emerge every 13 years and species that emerge every 17 years only emerge at the same time once every 221 years.

The basic concept can be adapted for this world, albeit altered to be on a more comfortable time scale. Let's say that there's some creature that hibernates underground for most of its life and only emerges every 13th or 17th day, depending on the subspecies.

Let's also say that these creatures are considered a delicacy and are highly sought-after, yet hard-to-find. While there would be groups foraging for them every 13th and 17th day, that rare occurrence every 221 days when the two cycles happen to coincide is an important day since you're twice as likely to find them, leading to a tradition where large parties of people would roam through the forests and fields in search of them, followed by a festival where the day's bounty is shared in the community.

While this specific example might be unsuitable, some event like this - where two or more otherwise frequent things happen to overlap - may be a cause for celebration or at the very least be notable. If that rare but regular event is also a convenient span of time, it may also be a useful yardstick for measuring longer time scales.

Answer 6

You would be unlikely to have a 365 day division. That's the direct result of our planet's orbit. It is probable that you'd have some larger units for grouping days into sets of uniform size.

Weeks are an example of an arbitrary grouping of days into sets of uniform size. Early Roman's used an 8 day division before eventually adopting the 7 day week. While revolutionary France experimented with a 10 day grouping.

Similarly larger groupings are also useful and can be of arbitrary size. As an example for ease of subdivision 6, 10 day segments could be composed together to create a 60 day pseudo-month. Then a handful of 60 day periods can make something yearlike.

Importantly remember that we matched our groupings of time to the motion if the planet for convenience. It is entirely arbitrary how time is subdivided. If we didn't use a base 10 number system we wouldn't have centuries.

Answer 7

Without natural cycles to base periods of time on, humans would simply use multiples, and/or man-made events. Humans love order and categorization, and in fact our survival depends on it; I suspect this would likely be the case for any sentient civilized species.

Weeks primarily exist because of celestial observations:

The Babylonians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, were astute observers and interpreters of the heavens, and it is largely thanks to them that our weeks are seven days long. The reason they adopted the number seven was that they observed seven celestial bodies — the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Simply use multiples

Without these, humans would probably lump days into groups of five or ten (because 5 fingers on a hand or 10 fingers on both make base-5 and base-10 relatively intuitive systems for us). Similarly, "years" might be groups of 10 weeks (so you'd have 100 days to the "year"). Beyond this you'd have decades, centuries, and millennia. If you had a different sentient species that had a different number of digits, their base system would likely somehow be based on that.

Man-made demarcations of time

Alternatively, if the government of your island is a single nation under a hereditary governmental system, perhaps each ruler's reign, and for larger epochs, a given dynasty: so "in the 15th year of Hamaz Magnus" would be understood to indicate the period of time ~1500-1600 days after the coronation of Hamaz Magnus in the Magnus Dynasty. Dynasties tend to rise and fall (revolutions, coups, lack of familial heirs, etc) so they will be irregular – you might have some where a given dynasty only has a single regent: if Hamaz Magnus was appointed the next heir by the childless Damek Brevel, but was in turn overthrown by his military advisor Jeupor Muron, the "Magnus Dynasty" would still be understood to be between the Brevel and Muron dynasties.

Of course, when speaking or writing more casually, no one will say "on the third day of the tenth week in the fifteenth year of Hamaz Magnus"; there will probably be some (at least quasi-)standard abbreviated notation, like "MagHa-15-10-3" or perhaps just "MagHa-15-33" – with only 100 days to the year, a year-day notation isn't horribly complex. To anyone used to this system, it's clearly Dynastic Name, Ruler Name, year, and day. Note that "MH" might be too ambiguous, especially if Jeupor's granddaughter were named Hicias in this example, so they'd probably include a few letters to disambiguate. Of course people being people, poor Hamaz might lose his surname and just get lumped in at the beginning of the Muron dynasty 😂

Answer 8

It sounds like you need at least one thing that’s constantly in a looping rotation, that way people could keep time by that. If you don’t want to have anything in a loop outside of the planet, you could try having them look to a certain type of animal that comes around yearly, a giant bird that travels around the earth in a constant pattern, etc. there are a lot of possibilities, but you need a bigger loop than just day to day.

Answer 9

If those living on this place are human or humanoids, they could end up with a decimal grouping for time, or any other numerical base:

• 1 day
• 10 days = 1 decade
• 10 decades = 1 month
• ad libitum

Answer 10

Communicating Time Intervals is Important for Cooperation

If people have to coordinate their activities, you need to measure time passage and be able to place events in time. You need to be able to say "The project will start on xxx date", or "We will all work on this for xxx hours". And there needs to be some way for everyone to synchronize their 'clocks' to a universal source.

What you didn't need to do (or can do) is base this time on astronomical synchronization. So you need to ask, "What are the important time intervals the people in my world will need?"

For example, we can start with the shortest interval that makes sense for coordination - maybe the smallest increment people can perceive and react to. Intermediate times would involve sleep cycles, eating cycles, etc. Longer time intervals would be needed for long-range planning, and the longest time intervals would be generational or lifespan.

For example:

1 Perceptron - 300 ms. Limit of perception. Smallest unit in a non-tech society.

100 Perceptrons = 1 Mintron. 30 seconds - smallest unit of useful measurable work, maybe.

100 Mintrons = 1 Plantron - 50 minutes, Smallest schedulable time period.

10 Plantrons - 1 Cycletron - a normal sleep cycle, or 1/3 of a 'day'

And so on. You also need a calendar to be able to place events in time. Without any external planetary or solar sources to place events in time, you need something else. Perhaps a known radioactive source where decay can be measured over time? 'Count 3280' was the time when measurement of the radiation of the holy source was 3280. This is an exponential rather than linear, so date calculations would be ugly. Perhaps there's a better, linear source for determining a date in the past or future. The resolution of the radioactive method would depend on the half life of the material used.

The main takeaway is that humans need to coordinate activity, so base your time on human needs rather than the movement of planets.

One other thing to consider: Coordination and synchrony is a big part of the natural world as well. Even wild animals and plants coordinate activity. So perhaps there is some natural timebase you could base your 'years' on. Maybe the transition from one year to the next happens every time the mass release of fungus spores occurs, which lights the sky red with particles that disperse blue light. Make it a holiday, and increment the 'year' when it happens. Record the exact radiation count of the holy source at the time to identify the specific year.

Answer 11

Every season

Instead of every 360 something days, you could do it based on seasons. I’ll use conventional seasons for ease of explaining.

We have winter, spring, summer, fall as our seasons. Every time winter starts, a new year starts. Therefore, we have season cycle (year) X, season X, day X.

Answer 12

I'll add on to the menstrual cycle (as a 'month'), a 'year' based on a typical pregnancy or the closest approximation of months, so their year may be nine months.

While this gives you a period (no pun intended), it doesn't give you a common start date, and may not even be consistent between communities.

Answer 13

By reigns of some big wig. Be it emperor, king, political or religious leader. Or on scale their families like Chinese dynasties. So long term would consist one of these which is variable length an intermediary period possibly and then some administrative cycles inside these reigns. How does the government work with taxation for example?

Answer 14

In the real world some people measure distance in feet. But when they get to larger distances that lead to inconveniently large numbers of feet, they switch to using yards or miles (or less commonly now: furlongs, leagues, etc). And of course it's easier to talk about inches than small fractions of a foot, etc.

There's no "natural cycle of distance" dictating these units, but people wanted to be able to easily talk about distances on various scales and simply invented different terms to make that easier, for no other reason than convenince.

The only reason in our world "a year" is pretty close to universal amongst human cultures is because it's so useful and obvious a cycle to measure. Even then we have "weeks" and "months" in modern English that are essentially arbitrary. People just developed and used those terms because it was convenient to have units that are around that length.

We've even decided that having "a month" be a vaguely-defined amount of time that keeps in sync with our-arbitrary calendar is more convenient than having "a month" correspond with the observable lunar cycle! So your people in their world really don't need to align their larger time units to an observable natural cycle. They'll still want terms vaguely similar to weeks, months, years.

So if you're going for "realism" they'll probably have different divisions of time than we do, but still some that perform the rough functions of "week", "month", "year", "decade", etc. But of course if you're going to invent your own system of units for time that's something your audience is going to have to comprehend to make sense of your characters talking about their world. It would be perfectly reasonable to just use "years" in your work anyway, on the understanding that this is a translation for the audience's benefit. After all, a "realistic" fictional world is unlikely to develop the exact systems we use for weight, distance, etc anyway so you're presumably translating those (not to mention the English language!).