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Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

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Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#671

Post by EdwardDiego »

Maursault wrote: post #632
EdwardDiego wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, from what I understand, it's generally accepted that some rabble rouser called Yeshua existed, and later had followers who considered him to be holy.

> Yeah, from what I understand, it's generally accepted that some rabble rouser called Yeshua existed, and later had followers who considered him to be holy. Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct. Jesus is the English transliteration of…

> Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct.

Wow, you must be a hit at parties. The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,". And perhaps consider the limits of your experiences and that wisdom is (partially) knowing what you don't know, and not attempting to speak with authority in such areas.

In wording my response to you, I've deliberately avoided other expressions from my dialect that may confuse you, but are very applicable. Like "twat" or "tosser", or "tu meke".

> Jesus is the English transliteration of a Germanic adaptation of the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Yeshua.

Yeah, nah. Thanks for contributing nothing that a basic Google of "Jesus Yeshua" wouldn't have.

In my dialect, "yeah, nah" often means "I'm experiencing fremdschämen".

> What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified.

You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.

Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.

Also, what sources are they working from?

Josephus, the closest there is to a contemporaneous source, doesn't mention baptism. Neither do Seutonius, Pliny the Younger, Mara bar-Serapion or Tacitus.

Maybe the scholars you refer to are extrapolating from the title "Anointed", or from the fact that, gosh, if you're saying this Jesus is sinless, and baptism is for the remission of sins, then why would you include a story in your holy writings that Jesus was baptised? It makes no sense, so you must've included it to be historically correct! Also known as proof by mortification. [0]

Or maybe, you're just referencing crap you garnered from a 5 minute speed read of Wikipedia that really needs more citations? Who knows? Tu meke au.

[0]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/biblical-literalism

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#672

Post by [deleted] »

jes5199 wrote: post #619
db48x wrote: post #596

The Qeng Ho in Deepness in the Sky had the right idea. They traveled from planet to planet in STL ships, and counted time purely in seconds. They had to account for relativity, but nothing else. A short task might take a kilosecond (about 16 minutes), a watch schedule might plan for activities covering a megasecond (close enough to a month for you and me), while a gigasecond is a good chunk of your life (32 years). "…

ah yes, "seconds", the "second minúte part of an hour", i.e. 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of the average time it takes the Earth to rotate towards Sol. very sensible default.

[deleted]

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#673

Post by Ekaros »

chungy wrote: post #383
Ekaros wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to actually even imagine what sort of hell an proper interstellar empire timekeeping is. Just ignore different planets having different orbital and rotational characteristic. Just the basic relativistic effects even with some type of instant transfers would make most communication and so on massively painful mess.

At least, we have a well-defined second. Assuming that humans make interstellar travel and/or colonization happen before being visited first, it's not entirely unreasonable that space-borne vessels will maintain the time and calendar system developed on Earth. It's convention, after all (we fudge it _just a bit_ here on Earth, too). Perhaps extrasolar colonies will have to develop a system that makes sense for whatev…

Problem isn't that second isn't well defined. Just that the rate of seconds passing in well defined way depend on location of observer. We already average bunch of clocks around the globe. But doing the same thing light years from each other...

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#675

Post by jessaustin »

mattigames wrote: post #631
jes5199 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah yes, "seconds", the "second minúte part of an hour", i.e. 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of the average time it takes the Earth to rotate towards Sol. very sensible default.

Personally I vote for a new unity as a measure of time, the 10+e7 part of the speed of light, so the equivalent to 2.99792458 seconds, it's a sensible default in my opinion, perhaps also another new unity that is the third of that one, it would be very close to a second (in case the space travelers have practical applications to have such measure of time)

How does this work? To get duration from speed, you also need to designate a distance, don't you? What is special about 898,755 km?

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#677

Post by beltsazar »

> "uh, it's supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it's off by 4 years, if he existed at all."

> "if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you're not sure exists?"

I find it quite offensive. Not all scholars agree that Jesus was raised from dead, but the existence of Jesus is accepted even by non-Christian scholars.

> Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[7][8][30] Historian Michael Grant asserts that if conventional standards of historical textual criticism are applied to the New Testament, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."[31] There is no indication that writers in antiquity who opposed Christianity questioned the existence of Jesus.[32][33]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#678

Post by Joeri »

w10-1 wrote: post #536
econ101time wrote: post #457

This is how a 12 year old internet atheist sees the world. Advanced alien species is just a stand-in for the know-it-all author. Grow up. These things all have good historical reasons. And you don't turn society upside down just to get some nice parsimony in the calendar. We have a system that works and is remarkably accurate. Changing it would upset millions of social customs, accounting systems, computer systems, e…

Actually, what you're suggesting is that even if it is broken, it's too costly to fix. Then you should ask: costly compared to what? If we fixed it, then innumerable generations after us would not have to deal with the problem. The idea of "historical reason" and "social custom" assumes what it tries to prove, that the past is more important than the future. The real problem is that we don't pay for the costs we impo…

Indeed. Most of humanity still has to be born, so whatever we improve for future humans will be outweighed by whatever hardship it imposes on us, from a strictly rational point of view.

The trick is: how do we know we’re making things better, and how do we know they will stick.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#679

Post by thaumasiotes »

IncRnd wrote: post #646
thaumasiotes wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... January, March, and June are named for Janus, Mars, and Juno. February, April, and May are not known to be named for any god, nor is there any particular reason to believe they are.

> February, April, and May are not known to be named for any god, nor is there any particular reason to believe they are. May is named after Maia, the goddess who oversees the growth of plants.

What makes you say that? According to who?

Compare what Ovid wrote about the name of May:

> You may ask whence I suppose the name of the month of May to be derived. The reason is not quite clearly known to me [because there are too many theories].

[J. G. Frazer's translation for the Loeb series]

That the name honors a Maia is one of three theories he goes on to present, the others being that May is named after the personification of Majesty [maiestas] and that May is named in honor of society's elders [maiores].

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#680

Post by csours »

octobus2021 wrote: post #63

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…

I saw someone wearing a Swatch Time t-shirt today!
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