Stealing day(s) from my post-apoc bunker society

Question

In a post-apoc world there are societies of people that live their entire lives in huge underground bunkers. They live there, as did their parents, as did their parents, and so forth.

Their only reference to time are the time-keeping devices they use that are based on pre-apoc time-keeping devices. There is no contact with the surface world or other societies.

If I wanted to steal time from these people, for whatever reason, say one whole day, I would likely go about stealing smaller units of time over a longer period of time. E.g. to steal a one day from a whole year I would:

1. calculate how many minutes a whole day has: 24 hours times 60 minutes = 1440 minutes
2. divide my minutes by a whole year of time-stealing: 1440 minutes divided by 365 days = ~4 minutes per day
3. steal these for minutes over the time of a whole day: e.g. every 1 minute every 6 hours, or about 10 seconds every hour

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Q: How much more time could I reasonably steal from my society? Or is this amount already too easy to detect?

• People live their daily lives, they have good education and are a healthy mix of skeptics and non-questioning sheeple
• Assume that I have full control over all time-keeping devices in this society.

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Stealing time: A person has 24 hours every day, 365 of these buggers every year (give or take 1 very 4 years), and about 80-100 of these years depending on the person and their lifestyle (excluding manslaughter). If I, let's say, steal a day from them every other week, they lose about a month every year (give or take), that makes them lose a year every dozen of them, which makes them live only 74-90 years¹ subjective.

_{¹Again: give or take - this is very loose math, like doing algebra with spaghetti}

Answer 1

Quite a lot

Humans that have no outside time reference, being able to observe the day/night cycle tends to fall into another rhythm than the 24 hour cycle we are used to.

Now unless people still have their physics books and can make pendulums, and it is as you say that you control all time-pieces... then you can easily steal quite a lot of time. As stated on Wikipedia's page on Time Perception, you can safely fudge the time at least 1 second per minute. For older people you can do it up to 12-15 seconds per minute and they will not notice.

So let us say that if you are only gradually changing the clocks, you can safely move time-keeping up to plus/minus 5 seconds per 1 minute.

Answer 2

Since you control all time keeping devices, it should be pretty easy to do undetectably.
Just change the length of a tick.
Each second only needs to be a micro fraction of a second shorter, which would be small enough that no one will notice.

Edit:
You could probably reduce the length by a tenth with no one really paying much attention, except that cooking times might have to be adjusted slightly. This would make a pretty big difference though. You'd end up with 144 stolen minutes a day, meaning that people would get 2 hours less sleep a night, and lose 36 days a year. Each year would only be around 11 months long, so you'd turn 18 almost two years early.

Thanks Vault Tec!

Edit 2:
Due to some confusion on my part, I'm not sure if the Vault days are supposed to be longer or shorter than outside days... So I'll just double up to play it safe...

Lets say each "second" is 1.1 seconds long. that means that each day is 95,040 real world seconds, instead of 86,400 like on the outside of the vault. So each day would be 26.4 real hours long. Each year is 36.5 days longer in outside time. They would age much "faster". and be 20 when they finally turned "18". And yeah, they'd die younger on average.

But if you go the other way, and each "second" is .9 seconds long, then you'd end up with 77,760 real world seconds a "day". People would age slower. Each day would be 21.6 real hours long. Each year is 36.5 days shorter in outside time. People would age slower and live "longer". You'd be around 16 when you turned "18".

Answer 3

Some thoughts...

Can you engineer a power outage? If so, once power is restored you can fudge how long the lights (and clocks!) were out. Tell people that it sure felt like forever, but it was really just over an hour...

Another answer suggested fiddle with the clocks to steal a few seconds from every hour; this adds up pretty fast, when you consider you're stealing time from each member of the community!

Another opportunity for stealing time will be when people are ... distracted. Have community parties. During the party, snag a few seconds here and there. Heck, even an hour. People will eventually look at the clocks and say, "Wow is it midnight already?" You can just smile and say "Time flies when you're having fun."

If you really want to kick your time-vampire shtick into high gear, go to the old folks' warren. Find the old guy snoozing in the armchair and take hours from him.

Answer 4

You may control the clocks, but do you control everything else? If, for example, your people are so far gone they can't remember "One-Mississippi" (or some such) to vaguely guess the length of a second, etc., then there's no point to your question. Therefore, you need to "steal the time" in such a way that their fundamental sense of time is not compromised.

Here are some limitations to what you can do to "steal time."

You can only take the time while they are sleeping.

People have an innate sense of time. We're basically diurnal in nature. We can consciously detect when things happen too quickly, like a pot taking no time at all to boil or the "sleep period" happening even an hour ealier than just a couple of weeks ago. After all, eveybody's tossing and turning and not falling asleep. But, shorten the sleep cycle... humans can live on short sleep rather effectively. Especially if it's treated or society changes to accomodate the challenges created by too little sleep. And it's something that can be accomplished gradually without notice.

Your society must never have a reason to doubt their clocks.

There are many ways to test time without the sun. Water clocks have been used since time immemorial and are fairly accurate. For checking just one minute, "one mississippi" is tedious, but reasonably accurate. The lower the tech of the clock, the harder it is for you to justify some villian's control over it in your story. Worst of all, the CD jacket says the song they just listened to is 3:53 minutes long but the clock says 4:00 minutes passed (hmmmm....). Therefore, one minute must always be one minute when they're conscious.

If your goal is to eventually remove them from the bunker, then your theft must synchronize with the outside world.

In other words, if they open the doors at 9:00am outside, the clocks had better say 9:00am inside. I'm making an assumption based on facts not in evidence as you haven't explained what's going on. If they never leave the bunkers, ever, then ignore this point.

But there is a deal killer....

There are a whoping number of things that are outside your control, like the lifespan of insects, the decay of radioluminescence, the frequency of a tuning fork, and most importantly, the harvest time of fruit and vegitables. You don't tell us how they're getting their food, but if they're growing it themselves, then at most you can take a couple of days per harvest or the gardeners will know the jig is up. Your bunkers and bunkettes have the divine gift of asking "what time is it?" and can therefore be manipulated, but the rest of the universe doesn't... and can't....