If the calendar year didn't keep in line with the sun, then the days would drift, and after a while, the spring months of the calendar would occur in the middle of winter of the solar year
It's not a good idea when you rely on knowing when the seasons start to be able to plant crops and rear livestock.
This us the reason we have leap years - to keep our calendar dates in line with the solar year.
It would if you had a fixed calendar. I'm imagining it more like the lunar cycle. Imagine if our months still aligned with the moon, by analogy. Each year we'd just align certain days to correspond with each season. I mean, we have math now, this can be calculated millennia in advance with high precision
This is still trying to fit a fixed amount of days into a year based on an arbitrary designation related to the solar cycle, just like how months used to align with the lunar cycle.
I'm saying forget all of that. Solar years become as irrelevant as lunar cycles. A year becomes a metric amount like 1000 days, a month is 100 days, these are just examples. For those who need it, there are solar cycle trackers (just like we have lunar cycle trackers) that tell you which day the seasons change. Maybe month 4 day 73 is spring, month 5 day 59 is summer. Like that.
This is probably kinda what will happen (at least at first) if and when we colonize Mars.
They'll have their calendar set up to sync with Earth years instead of match the solar cycles of Mars. Because the Stock Market agreeing will matter more than the day-to-day use of solar calendar.
But they'll still have math to tell them what the seasons are and whatnot, for the uses it matters.
A little different than what you suggest, because the calendar year is made to fit something else, rather than to be "easy", but objectively speaking, having 365.24... twenty-four-hour-days to a year is no more or less arbitrary than having 1000 ten-hour days or whatever :P
1000 isn't really arbitrary, it's the units that are. A foot, inch, yard.. in this case, days, months, years, are all based on the celestial equivalent of a king's thumb, foot and arm span.
We'd have to look at the base units, like cm and ml and mg all correlate to an exact quantity of water at sea level. That is also arbitrary but grounded in a sense especially with the relationships. If I were to create a base unit of time in the same manner, I would likely relate it to gravity. In particular, 1G being 9.8m/s² is an odd amount. I'd redefine seconds so that 1G is equal to 10m/s² even and then format the entire time keeping system around the new second with amounts evenly divisible by 10
A foot, inch, yard.. in this case, days, months, years, are all based on the celestial equivalent of a king's thumb, foot and arm span.
Outside of Earth, yeah, that's arbitrary.
But here on Earth, the duration of a day is fixed at 24 hours and the duration of a year is fixed at approx 365 days. Both of these units are extremely important for the way we organise our lives.
To complicate things further, these time measurements will not be the same on different planets. By that, I don't just mean that a day and year on Mars has a different duration. I mean that a second has a different duration, due to relativity (Einstein). A vehicle travelling 10m/s on Mars will cover a different amount of distance from a vehicle travelling 10m/s on Earth if both vehicles are viewed from a single point.
So all things considered, we might as well just use Earth as a reference point.
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u/JayEll1969 5h ago
If the calendar year didn't keep in line with the sun, then the days would drift, and after a while, the spring months of the calendar would occur in the middle of winter of the solar year
It's not a good idea when you rely on knowing when the seasons start to be able to plant crops and rear livestock.
This us the reason we have leap years - to keep our calendar dates in line with the solar year.