I actually developed a metric time for that reason, alongside with an International Fixed Calendar using the Holocene Era. I originally designed it on an excel spreadsheet, but it also works on libreoffice spreadsheets. The calendar itself isn’t metric, but it’s highly regular, and that makes it nice imo. The spreadsheet auto-updates the time once you edit the spreadsheet (put random character somewhere, remove). But I sadly don’t know how to put that on a working site or whatever, or as software…
I picked the Holocene Era because it’s globally actually relevant, and it’s not tied to a controversial figure (2026 being tied to Christ).
Basically, it’s right now, according to my calendar:
Year: 11’726
Month: 1
Week: 2
Day of year: 12
Hour: 8
Minute: 1
How does the calendar work?
There are 364 days in a year. There are 13 months of 28 days each, divided in weeks of 7 days. There are two additional days, New Year’s Eve and Leap Day. They don’t belong to any day of the week. (Religious groups that object, can just have an extra day of prayer, or use their own calendar). The extra month can be called Midsummer, or Solsticy. (Or just name the months “first, second month” and days likewise).
The first day after New Year’s Eve is the first day of the year. It will always be a Monday, starting the year and week proper. Leap Day will occur before New Year’s Eve.
The start of the year will be the northern equinox, since then the day is equally long worldwide, and more people live up north.
Alternatively, to ease adoption, it can be one day after the northern solstice (so, 21/22 December in the old calendar), or one day after the latest sunrise in the northern hemisphere (which then would place year’s start on 1 January in the old calendar).
How does the day work?
There are 100’000 seconds (instead of 86,400).
There are 10’000 tenths.
There are 1’000 minutes.
There are 100 hundreds (or quarters)
There are 10 hours.
And that is 1 day.
Left is new unit, right their old equivalent:
second: 0.864 old second
tenth: 8.64 old seconds
minute: 1.44 old minute (1 min, 26.4 sec)
hundred: 14.4 old minutes (14 min, 24 sec)
hour: 2.4 old hours (2 hr, 24 min)
Yes to the days of the year - only sensible way to do it. Added bonus that the first day of each month is always a Monday, which makes it easy to calculate days-of-week in your head. Also, two days holiday at new year every leap year, yeah.
Metric seconds is a bit trickier. Most units of measurement have ‘time’ in them in some way.
The SI is obviously that way - length is defined as metres per second of light in vacuum, mass by fixing the Planck constant in kilogram metres squared per second. But Imperial units, besides the fact that they’re usually defined in law in terms of the SI, also have a lot of their derived units include time - mph and psi for instance.
Unless you’re wanting to redefine basically every unit of measurement in your new system, then you need to stick with the second, which means you’re stuck with ~86400 seconds per day, because that’s how fast the world turns, and there’s no particularly better way to subdivide it.
Although if your new calendar could also fix the damned mess that is time zones at the same time, I’d be willing to give it a shot.
Time zones are tricky, because it’d establish that the New Year would begin equally everywhere - which simply is not the case. I’d prefer to keep them. Just as Discord has a hammertime function that uses the Unix time format to display dates flexibly, that could be an idea. You could implement that time formats automatically are given in such a format, so that everyone sees at what time it is. Problem solved!
But if you had to, I would suggest to pick the line between Russia and the US, since almost nobody lives there (or even around there, save for New Zealand and Hawaii), and there are almost no islands there. This whereas on both sides of the line between Greenland and Iceland, there is a wide expanse with many people.
I actually developed a metric time for that reason, alongside with an International Fixed Calendar using the Holocene Era. I originally designed it on an excel spreadsheet, but it also works on libreoffice spreadsheets. The calendar itself isn’t metric, but it’s highly regular, and that makes it nice imo. The spreadsheet auto-updates the time once you edit the spreadsheet (put random character somewhere, remove). But I sadly don’t know how to put that on a working site or whatever, or as software…
I picked the Holocene Era because it’s globally actually relevant, and it’s not tied to a controversial figure (2026 being tied to Christ).
Basically, it’s right now, according to my calendar:
Year: 11’726
Month: 1
Week: 2
Day of year: 12
Hour: 8
Minute: 1
How does the calendar work?
There are 364 days in a year. There are 13 months of 28 days each, divided in weeks of 7 days. There are two additional days, New Year’s Eve and Leap Day. They don’t belong to any day of the week. (Religious groups that object, can just have an extra day of prayer, or use their own calendar). The extra month can be called Midsummer, or Solsticy. (Or just name the months “first, second month” and days likewise).
The first day after New Year’s Eve is the first day of the year. It will always be a Monday, starting the year and week proper. Leap Day will occur before New Year’s Eve.
The start of the year will be the northern equinox, since then the day is equally long worldwide, and more people live up north.
Alternatively, to ease adoption, it can be one day after the northern solstice (so, 21/22 December in the old calendar), or one day after the latest sunrise in the northern hemisphere (which then would place year’s start on 1 January in the old calendar).
How does the day work?
There are 100’000 seconds (instead of 86,400).
There are 10’000 tenths.
There are 1’000 minutes.
There are 100 hundreds (or quarters)
There are 10 hours.
And that is 1 day.
Left is new unit, right their old equivalent:
second: 0.864 old second
tenth: 8.64 old seconds
minute: 1.44 old minute (1 min, 26.4 sec)
hundred: 14.4 old minutes (14 min, 24 sec)
hour: 2.4 old hours (2 hr, 24 min)
It works out relatively niftily, to be honest.
Yes to the days of the year - only sensible way to do it. Added bonus that the first day of each month is always a Monday, which makes it easy to calculate days-of-week in your head. Also, two days holiday at new year every leap year, yeah.
Metric seconds is a bit trickier. Most units of measurement have ‘time’ in them in some way.
The SI is obviously that way - length is defined as metres per second of light in vacuum, mass by fixing the Planck constant in kilogram metres squared per second. But Imperial units, besides the fact that they’re usually defined in law in terms of the SI, also have a lot of their derived units include time - mph and psi for instance.
Unless you’re wanting to redefine basically every unit of measurement in your new system, then you need to stick with the second, which means you’re stuck with ~86400 seconds per day, because that’s how fast the world turns, and there’s no particularly better way to subdivide it.
Although if your new calendar could also fix the damned mess that is time zones at the same time, I’d be willing to give it a shot.
Time zones are tricky, because it’d establish that the New Year would begin equally everywhere - which simply is not the case. I’d prefer to keep them. Just as Discord has a hammertime function that uses the Unix time format to display dates flexibly, that could be an idea. You could implement that time formats automatically are given in such a format, so that everyone sees at what time it is. Problem solved!
But if you had to, I would suggest to pick the line between Russia and the US, since almost nobody lives there (or even around there, save for New Zealand and Hawaii), and there are almost no islands there. This whereas on both sides of the line between Greenland and Iceland, there is a wide expanse with many people.
I’m always looking for a fun little project, I could dev that into a desktop app or website if you wanted.
Yes sure!