583
What's some really unpopular opinion you have?
(self.asklemmy)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
583 points (94.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43939 readers
466 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think the time one is a good unpopular opinion. For example "day" is one of the most common time units there is. I really can't see anyone advocating for a system that is unrelated to day/night cycle.
If night was to fall, sun was to rise and it wasn't a new day yet? And the days ended at different times on different days? Absolutely no one would like that and we'd go back to using days almost instantly.
With that issue always in mind, you're still bound to the earth's rotation for every time-related issue (and a similar one around seasons also looms, for the earths orbit). And you're back at square one.
Well, we could always switch to another time unit that uses 1 day as the base unit. Then you would just use md, nd, Gd, Md and all the other prefixes to get to the scale you need. That would be fine for most purposes.
However, the problem is that a day isn’t exactly 86.4 ks, since orbits and rotations are wobbly and messy. If we define the day as a unit today, it won’t be the same a thousand years later. Perhaps the people of the future could use that for common purposes, but scientists would need to use a more precise version that has a crazy litany of decimals at the end. Using the Earth as a foundation for any kind of unit is just asking for trouble in the long run.