You should be able to get time just by labeling the orbits in your diagram of the solar system. Of course, you’ll have to remember that the sidereal year is one day longer. Just label the Earth’s orbit “year” and the Earth’s spin “sidereal” and then write 1(year)=366.25 days. Hopefully the aliens are tolerant of approximations. They may first think these are distances, but their next guess when they see the math doesn’t work would probably be time.
Then draw a line on your diagram between the Earth and the sun. Thats 1AU. The speed of light is about 173 AU/day (it’s a little less with sidereal days, a little more with solar days).
The problem then is that all the constants you’re used to are based the solar day. Eventually the aliens will get confused. One solar day = 1.00273791 sidereal days. But no one will remember that. It might be easier to remember 1 sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
Or I guess if you have a constellation chart your could draw in the ecliptic plane and label that. But dang are our units screwed up.
1AU =149 598 000 kilometers but if you’re a provincial American like me you know miles. 1AU=92 955 887.6 miles…
I don’t think a lot of scientists have this stuff memorized (1 obviously looked up just about all these numbers, except for hrs/sidereal day).
I would be really nice if we had all our units based off the speed of light or something. That would make this so much easier.
You should be able to get time just by labeling the orbits in your diagram of the solar system. Of course, you’ll have to remember that the sidereal year is one day longer. Just label the Earth’s orbit “year” and the Earth’s spin “sidereal” and then write 1(year)=366.25 days. Hopefully the aliens are tolerant of approximations. They may first think these are distances, but their next guess when they see the math doesn’t work would probably be time.
Then draw a line on your diagram between the Earth and the sun. Thats 1AU. The speed of light is about 173 AU/day (it’s a little less with sidereal days, a little more with solar days).
The problem then is that all the constants you’re used to are based the solar day. Eventually the aliens will get confused. One solar day = 1.00273791 sidereal days. But no one will remember that. It might be easier to remember 1 sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
Or I guess if you have a constellation chart your could draw in the ecliptic plane and label that. But dang are our units screwed up.
1AU =149 598 000 kilometers but if you’re a provincial American like me you know miles. 1AU=92 955 887.6 miles…
I don’t think a lot of scientists have this stuff memorized (1 obviously looked up just about all these numbers, except for hrs/sidereal day).
I would be really nice if we had all our units based off the speed of light or something. That would make this so much easier.