By Mehran Moghtadaei (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Under the American style, however, next year is going to be the media bonanza: there will be a 3/14/15. Never mind that you should round that 5 to a 6; I’m willing to bet that the media coverage for 3/14/16 will not be as great. But then again, if you want to write it in this order, next year there will be a 3/14/15 9:26:53.58979… The prefect representation of pi!

As long as you use that calendar, clock, date notation, time notation, and sequence of date and time. The clock is based on an arbitrary division of the day into hours, the arbitrary hours into an arbitrary number of minutes, the arbitrary minutes into an arbitrary number of seconds, while the calendar is based on a “close-enough” alignment of Earth-rotations to Earth-revolutions, with a “best guess (at the time)” of the nativity of Christ.

Which is all well and good for most media coverage, but is there an option for selecting temporal units other than the arbitrary or Earth-centric seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years, and a 0-point (or “epoch”) other than a guess at the nativity? There is!

The metric system uses seconds (and so kiloseconds, megaseconds, teraseconds, and otherwise), but those are based on a particular definition of “second”, the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K. Since I don’t understand that, I won’t rely on it, and I wouldn’t expect the same selection to be made independently.

No, what we need are natural units, units whose definitions are based on universal constants. I think Planck time (t_P) would do admirably. It’s tiny, about 5.39106×10⁻⁴⁴ seconds. If a ZettaPlanck time (Zt_P) is a sextillion Planck times, 20 sextillion Zt_P would be just over a second. Without a change in our understanding of physics, there’s no such thing as a fraction of a Planck time. I don’t understand everything else around it, but it makes more sense than the definition of a second.

OK, so what about the selection of the start of our counting point? I think the Big Bang should serve here. It is estimated at 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago. So:

13,798,000,000 years × 31,556,952 seconds in the average Gregorian year ÷ 5.39106×10⁻⁴⁴ seconds per t_P puts us at about 8.0767571×10⁶⁰ t_P. So we’re waiting for 3.14159265358979…×10⁶¹ t_P to celebrate the next “Pi Planck Time” (πt_P). That will happen around 39,872,000,000 AD (rounding off to five significant figures). The Big Bang is closer to us than that. Similarly, the last πt_P was closer to the Big Bang than to us. It happened in 8,431,000,000 BC. Sigh. So I can see why the media will use the usual calendars and clocks instead.

—jhunterj

P.S. Any math or formula errors are mine. Please point them out in the comments.

Further Reading

Bang! The Complete History of the Universe , by Patrick Moore

Complexity and the Arrow of Time , by Charles H. Lineweaver

Pi: A Biography of the World’s Most Mysterious Number , by Alfred S. Posamentier

Back then, I tweeted the blog post along and forwarded to the guys at Catan LLC, since they love seeing Catan mentioned in non-game-industry media. I also commented on the story there.

Forget-Not by Z Joya, on Flickr (BY-NC-SA)

I love this topic. My own epiphany in digital memory came back when I was trying to figure out if I was going to work with Dave Arneson on GURPS Civil War. (This was a long time ago; Dave has since died, and GURPS Civil War never came off, and the page soliciting it has been doing so since 2003.) So some time in those dark ages of online search, I happened across a message board archive (maybe Usenet, maybe some BBoard emulation) where a poster mentioned working with Dave, and I reached out to him about the experience. I don’t remember how he felt about working with Dave, but I distinctly remember his initial rejoinder: The Internet means never having to say “I don’t recall.”

Probably there are things that have disappeared from (or “been forgotten by”) the digital hivemind. But you’d be hard-pressed to guarantee that a particular bit of tid is nowhere to be found anymore. This knowledge is why it’s sometimes hard to watch action soap operas like 24. If you have a video incriminating the very powerful person and want to get the story out, just upload it.

There are some great thinkers thinking interesting things about what it means to be able to remember everything virtually these days, and what it means not being able to be forgotten. If you haven’t read all of these, they cover some good ground — this in basically my order of enjoyment:

• Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, by Gordon Bell & Jim Gemmell
• Ambient Findability, by Peter Morville
• Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger.

The last book in particular ends with a fizzle, since I don’t think much of the plausibility of his solutions. But it was worth reading for the investigation of the problem.

I’ve also been reading some interesting things in “Data Finds Data” (Jonas & Sokol, in Beautiful Data).

—jhunterj

Our view of Dr. Tyson. Photo by J. Hunter Johnson, released under CC-BY-SA-3.0

Even though we were near the back, and beat the turn-away cutoff by less than 15 minutes.

One topic in particular that Dr. Tyson hit upon got me thinking. Time was, ego lead us to place Earth at the center of everything—our foundation was special, indeed unique, something planets wandered around, not something that wandered itself. When that position was no longer tenable, we fell back to the Sun—the Sun was special, not like those other bits of light in the sky. Then that became a lost cause too, so we (perhaps less adamantly) suspected that the Milky Way galaxy was special. But that’s no longer true either. Dr. Tyson identified the logical next to fall in this trendline:

The universe.

We’ve run out of identifiable aggregates within the universe, but perhaps the universe itself is one of unknown billions of universe in a multiverse. And then that multiverse is one of many multi-multiverses. And so on.

But these are tougher barriers. Better and better telescopes would let us examine more and more of the contents of our universe, in the usual three dimensions and through what Dr. Tyson called the “time machine” as we see light that was emitted millions of years ago. But we can’t simply build a bigger telescope or look a little further into the crevices of those dimensions to find other universes. The math may hold up, but to verify it, we’d need to get outside of these dimensions, and that’s where my mind falls back to simple science fiction, like Alternate Earths. I’m still perfectly willing to say the universe bucks the trend and that there might be more universes out “there”, but that there also might not be—out “there” might only exist mathematically.

And if we do figure out what out “there” actually is, how we get to the multi-multiverse is that much more beyond my ken.

But as Dr. Tyson also summed up: it doesn’t need to make us feel insignificant. We are all part of that whole, no matter how big the whole is.

—jhunterj