What the Fuck is a gigasecond!? Sun. Jul 29th, 07
Last year I was reading a novel by Charles Stross, “Singularity Sky.” Er, I think that was it. Anyway, he reckons time differently in his novels. (Maybe I’m thinking of “Accelerando.”) Anyway, in one or more of his novels and or stories, he reckons time thusly (I think it’s uniform): Instead of a day, he’ll say “one hundred kiloseconds,” a yearish stretch of time would be thirty megaseconds. The novel I was reading at the time had no cheat-sheet included, so I was kind of lost. I tried to google it, but no luck. I am reading another of his novels now (Glasshouse), though, and it does have a cheat-sheet. In order to be of some help, perhaps, to some SF fan out there wasting kiloseconds trying to figure out if a year or a decade just passed, I’ll post that cheat-sheet here. If you can help clarify all this, please do so in the comments. I always struggle with “hard SF” and welcome help.
Charles Stross was the author of that BBC article speculating on a time in the near future when all human experience* will be able to be stored on media the size of a grain of sand.
one second
One second, the time taken for light to travel 299,792,458 meters in vacuum.
one kilosecond
Archaic: 16 minutes
one hundred kiloseconds (1 diurn)
Archaic: 27 hours, 1 day and three hours
one megasecond (1 cycle)
Ten diurns. Archaic: eleven days and six hours
thirty megaseconds (1 m-year)
300 diurns. Archaic: 337 Earth days (11 months)
one gigasecond
Archaic: approximately 31,000 Earth years (half age of human species)
one petasecond
Archaic: approximately 31,000,000 Earth years (half elapsed time since end of Cretaceous era)
*Whatever the hell that means.
