Small worldbuilding issue - why do days have 27 hours?

[hamskii]

In real life, the reason that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, and 360 degrees in a circle are because those numbers all have a large number of integer factors. In the days before we had calculators, this made them much easier to work with than base 10.

 

In Eora, the day length is 27 hours. 27 has factors 1, 3, 9, and 27, whereas 24 has factors 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24. It would make much more sense for any mathematically-inclined culture to simply

• define minutes, hours, days etc. to be derived from the second (so a minute is derived as 60 seconds, and a second is not defined as ¹/₆₀th of a minute), and
• redefine the second to be a little longer in such a way that its derived quantities are numbers with a lot of factors.

My suspicion is that the number "27" was chosen for the number of hours in a day so that the setting would not seem like it had lazily been copied from real life - but sometimes, things are the way they are in real life for a good reason. It's unlikely to change at this point, however, so what are some ways in which it could be justified in-universe?

[DreamWayfarer]

I agree, it is quite ridiculous. Maybe the Vailian Empire of old had a very strongbtendency to mysticism and though the number 27 was particularly auspicious.

 

For a more mathematically inclined culture, 24 or 30 do make more sense.

[Teioh_White]

Same reason Vampires are called Fampyrs, I'd guess.

[PrimeJunta]

Well, 12 and 24 aren't ideal either. In a base-10 system you would want to go with 10 and 20, or if you want to be able to neatly subdivide, 8/16 or 16/32 would've been cleaner.

 

I do think it's strange that it's an odd number though, since the division into day and night "naturally" splits the cycle into daylight hours and nighttime hours.

[falchen]

It's a fictional fantasy world, why not? Basically:

 

Same reason Vampires are called Fampyrs, I'd guess.

 

[RingMachine]

I didn't realize people had these types of complaints about fantasy games.

[Caribou]

I didn't realize people had these types of complaints about fantasy games.

 

Go read through the thread in this forum about how the game's ending shoves atheist propaganda down your throat, because the in-game universe gods may have been created by man.

 

Honestly, I didn't even notice the 27 hours in a day.

[Urocyon]

Because Eora spins 12.5% slower than Earth?

[the_dog_days]

The speed of Eora's rotation is governed by a Giant Space Pig on a hamsters wheel at the center of the planet. Should Atlas 2.0 ever stop running the world will come to an abrupt halt, send billions of kith into space with the force of the built up inertia (minus the effects of gravity, atmospheric pressure, and shoe traction).

[Crucis]

In real life, the reason that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, and 360 degrees in a circle are because those numbers all have a large number of integer factors. In the days before we had calculators, this made them much easier to work with than base 10.

 

In Eora, the day length is 27 hours. 27 has factors 1, 3, 9, and 27, whereas 24 has factors 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24. It would make much more sense for any mathematically-inclined culture to simply

• define minutes, hours, days etc. to be derived from the second (so a minute is derived as 60 seconds, and a second is not defined as ¹/₆₀th of a minute), and
• redefine the second to be a little longer in such a way that its derived quantities are numbers with a lot of factors.

My suspicion is that the number "27" was chosen for the number of hours in a day so that the setting would not seem like it had lazily been copied from real life - but sometimes, things are the way they are in real life for a good reason. It's unlikely to change at this point, however, so what are some ways in which it could be justified in-universe?

 

 

This is untrue, at least not directly.  The existing format of time measurements can be dated back to the ancient Egyptians.

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time-division-days-hours-minutes/

 

 

As for why Eora uses a 27 hour day, I assume that it's just a case of this being a fantasy setting and the writers just wanted to make Eora different from Earth in this respect.  It's no different from any other sci-fi oir fantasy setting on a non-Earth planet.  You can't assume that every planet inhabited by humans is going to have a rotational period that's really close to 24 hours.  That's just not a realistic assumption.

 

I will say that arguably it might be easier on the players if Eora was a 24 hours to a day setting just so that the players didn't have to make any mental conversions in the process of playing the game. 

[anameforobsidian]

If you really want to square with realism, just say that it used to be 24 hours before the moon fell.

[DreamWayfarer]

So why didn't they make the hours longer/shorter instead of having such a headache inducing number? No one is asking why their days are apparently longer, only why they decided to divide it in such a weird number, instead of 24, 28 or 30, which are much more pratical to work with.

Edited April 12, 2016 by DreamWayfarer

[omgFIREBALLS]

27 is 1000 in base 3. It ain't without merits for a culture to whom base 10 didn't come naturally. But for most part I'm happy to go with it being there mostly to make Eora different from Earth.

[Lychnidos]

27 is 1000 in base 3. It ain't without merits for a culture to whom base 10 didn't come naturally. But for most part I'm happy to go with it being there mostly to make Eora different from Earth.

 

That doesn't make any sense in the discussion at hand, people aren't talking about symbolic representation of numbers. Writing twenty-seven with the symbols 11011, 1000 or 27, doesn't change with which numbers it is divisible.

[omgFIREBALLS]

We humans are overly fond of powers of ten. 100, 1000 and so forth are special milestones to us. If for some reason base 3 came more naturally to us (bye fingers), then we'd obsess over what are 9 and 27 in base 10; 100 and 1000 in base 3. Is it such a leap of logic to think that some other civilization (say Engwithans) used base 3 and then used 1000 (27) hours in a day because it was such a pretty number, and kith just kept it but in base 10?

 

I'd love it if every decision had to be mathematically justified, but you don't see every human being walking around with a disposition chart along the theme of Passionate 0 Rational 4. Nor is it easy to replace an established system, even with one that makes more sense.

 

Also, I may be misinformed, but 360 degrees in a circle isn't about divisibility so much as that's what the Sumerians (or some civilization in that area) calculated the duration of a year to be. Of course, they may have very well been seduced by divisibility in the process, but still.

[JerekKruger]

This question has been bugging me for a while too. I don't really understand what it adds to a setting to make such an arbitrary decision.

 

So why didn't they make the hours longer/shorter instead of having such a headache inducing number? No one is asking why their days are apparently longer, only why they decided to divide it in such a weird number, instead of 24, 28 or 30, which are much more pratical to work with.

 

Exactly. An hour isn't a fundamental unit of time, it's based on a period of time (the time it takes the Earth to rotate once fully) which is not something that makes sense on another planet. Whatever an hour is on Eora, it would be based on the length of an Eoran day. There are good reasons for defining 24 as the number of hours in the day, it is by no means the best or only choice, but 27 doesn't compare.

 

@omgFIREBALLS: it's worth noting that revolutionary France tried to bring in a decimal time along with the rest of the decimal metric system, and that whilst the metric system wasn't too hard to make stick, people really couldn't accept decimal time. So in this case it seems our obsession with base-10 wasn't enough.

[hamskii]

If you really want to square with realism, just say that it used to be 24 hours before the moon fell.

 

I think this is the proposed explanation I like the most so far. Not sure how you'd square it up with the Iroccian calendar being only 150 years old, though. I also don't know how much energy it'd take to change the orbital period of an Earth-sized planet by 3 hours (assuming that a second is as long as it is in real life, and assuming that Eora is Earth-sized, which you could actually probably calculate from the falling animation from Skyward Kick or something if you cared enough - which you shouldn't, because that level of thought almost certainly didn't go into a single animation), but I imagine it'd be catastrophic enough that there wouldn't be much macroscopic life left on the planet.

[JerekKruger]

I think this is the proposed explanation I like the most so far. Not sure how you'd square it up with the Iroccian calendar being only 150 years old, though. I also don't know how much energy it'd take to change the orbital period of an Earth-sized planet by 3 hours (assuming that a second is as long as it is in real life, and assuming that Eora is Earth-sized, which you could actually probably calculate from the falling animation from Skyward Kick or something if you cared enough - which you shouldn't, because that level of thought almost certainly didn't go into a single animation), but I imagine it'd be catastrophic enough that there wouldn't be much macroscopic life left on the planet.

 

The main problem with this, as mentioned in another thread, is that a moon falling into Eora would be an extinction event at best and a total destruction of all life at worst (depending on the size of the moon) so you're trading one problem for another sadly.

 

Then again, if skyward kick is anything to go by, gravity is very low on Eora so maybe that makes a difference 

[omgFIREBALLS]

@omgFIREBALLS: it's worth noting that revolutionary France tried to bring in a decimal time along with the rest of the decimal metric system, and that whilst the metric system wasn't too hard to make stick, people really couldn't accept decimal time. So in this case it seems our obsession with base-10 wasn't enough.

I actually feel stupid just for reading about it, lol. Thanks for that gem.

[JerekKruger]

I actually feel stupid just for reading about it, lol. Thanks for that gem.

 

There seems to be something about time that is more inherent than other measurements I think. I learnt recently that, when the US rail-road companies tried to introduce railway time there were protests and even riots in various cities. People simply could not accept the idea that midday wouldn't be the time when the sun was at its highest where they were.

[Lychnidos]

In the end the issue is that 27 isn't divisible by 2, i.e. the number of clear, natural, everybody-agrees-on parts of day, the homonymous day and the night.

 

Also, there isn't a size requirement for an orbiting object to be called a moon.

Edited April 12, 2016 by Lychnidos

[JerekKruger]

Also, there isn't a size requirement for an orbiting object to be called a moon.

 

This is true, but I doubt that lady in the Gref's Rest would be singing about it if it had been a pebble 

[omgFIREBALLS]

In the end the issue is that 27 isn't divisible by 2, i.e. the number of clear, natural, everybody-agrees-on parts of day, the homonymous day and the night.

I suppose one could anal around with a one hour mid-day, but I'll leave it to the writers to say such if anything.

 

 

Also, there isn't a size requirement for an orbiting object to be called a moon.

"You know baby, if I were to cut this thing off and put it in orbit around Earth, it'd be large enough to be considered a moon."

[Skirge01]

In the end the issue is that 27 isn't divisible by 2, i.e. the number of clear, natural, everybody-agrees-on parts of day, the homonymous day and the night.

 

Also, there isn't a size requirement for an orbiting object to be called a moon.

 

I've stayed out of this thread for a while because it was hurting my head, even though I was wondering the same thing.    While I'm no scientist or mathematician and someone may easily disprove what I'm about to say, I figured I'd share it anyhow.  We're thinking that Earth has 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, but that's not what we actually have.  Throughout the year, at 41 degrees latitude (northern parts of the US), there's a maximum of 15 hours of daylight and a minimum of 9*.  At 65 degrees latitude (near Fairbanks, Alaska), there's a maximum of 21.1 hours of daylight and a minimum of 2.9 hours.

 

Perhaps the people of Eora were smart enough to consider how much daylight they have, on average, and used that for "day"?  I haven't actually looked at just how many hours long an Eora day or night cycle is, though, (a quick Wiki search turned up nothing) so I'll just throw out some numbers.  What if a day in Eora averages 15 hours long, while night averages 12 hours?

 

* Source:  Have fun!

[JerekKruger]

It's a good point Skirge01. Most Westerners live most of the year round on a 16-8 schedule anyway, substituting a lack of natural light with electric light when necessary, and under a 27 hour day that would convert to a 18-9 schedule. That said, I think divisibility by 2 is a pretty natural desire so unless the kith or Eora are very different to us humans it seems surprising that they'd choose an odd number.