this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Think "you wake up in the woods naked," Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?

My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit's dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.

I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.

That's as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There is a calendar that proposes to have 13 months, each with 28 days. That gives you 364 days. Day 365 is new years day and is not part of any month. There are still leap years because as stated, the Earth goes around the sun in 365.24... days. To not need leap years we'd need that to be a whole number.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really like that one! Guess there's really no easy way around leap day, but i was thinking you could add an extra ~60.684 seconds to each day and pretend its the same thing? Even increasing the second to be slightly longer could make it possible i think, since we are restarting from scratch it would be easier to adjust it slightly

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Assuming you can measure that precisely. We had to wait centuries to figure out the differebce between a solar and a sideral day.