Decimal Time - Decimal Times in Fiction

Decimal Times in Fiction

Some science fiction authors use decimal time to reinforce the sense of "otherworldliness", notably in Infocom's Planetfall and Stationfall games, which use "1 chronon = 1/10000 day" such that 0000 = midnight and 5000 = noon.

Isaac Asimov also uses and describes the use of decimal time by the humans from the planet Solaria in his novel The Naked Sun, in which he describes the Solarian hour as being divided into ten decads, each of which is divided into a hundred centads.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky include human cultures that base time on seconds and multiples of seconds, with one "kilosecond" equal to 1,000 seconds (or approximately 15 minutes), one "megasecond" equal to 1,000,000 seconds (or approximately two weeks), and one "gigasecond" equal to 1,000,000,000 seconds (or approximately 30 years).

Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars tells the story of a starship crew that structure their calendar in "tendays" instead of weeks. Tendays are also mentioned in Diane Duane's The Wounded Sky.

Fritz Lang's science fiction film Metropolis depicts what is often misinterpreted as a decimal clock, as it has ten numerals, but it actually measures a workers' shift of ten conventional hours in one cycle, not decimal hours. Since a normal day cannot be divided into a whole number of such shifts, a 24-hour clock is displayed above the shift clock to give the actual time of day.

In the episode of The Simpsons titled "They Saved Lisa's Brain", the members of Springfield's Mensa make changes to their town, including the implementation of "metric time" to determine the time of day. Dr. Hibbert comments that the time is "eighty past ten". Using "metric time" to indicate decimal time, Principal Skinner comments that the city's trains are not only running on time, but they are running on metric time, while looking at an analog clock with numbers 1–10.

In the original Battlestar Galactica television series, both the Colonials and the Cylon Alliance employed a decimal time system. An are was an equivalent of an hour but was nearly twice as long. A centon was 1/100th of an are, in the same order of magnitude as a minute. A micron was 1/1000 of an are, on the same order of magnitude as a second. A centare was 100 are units and represented the same order of magnitude of time as a week. A yahren was 100 centare units and represented the same order of magnitude as a year. Usage of these terms was not always consistent. In the pilot, "Saga of a Star World", Lew Ayres as President Adar used the term "years". And occasionally, the terms above were used inconsistently, or other time terms were used in place of those listed above which seemed to be the same as one of those defined above (e.g. Secton).

The Warhammer 40,000 science fiction wargame universe uses a dating system that includes a year fraction, dividing the year into 1,000 equal parts (just over 8 hours each). Dates include an optional accuracy specifier, year fraction, year, and millenium so you see dates like 0123456.M41, which would be the decimal year 40456.123 with an accuracy of 0 (on earth).

The stardates used in Star Trek represented the time of day as a decimal fraction, so that they incremented by 0.1 every tenth of a day. In addition, in Star Trek:The Next Generation and its spin-offs, years were divided into 1000 stardates. The stardates in the 2009 film did not use decimal time, however.

The wall stopwatch with 100-second dial was used in the sheep contest in part 6 (out of 10) of The 10th Kingdom miniseries.