Asklemmy

43965 readers

1798 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

If you were an intelligent sea creature who could not always rely on the sky to tell time (as is often the norm whilst out there), what would you use as a time reference if you wanted to measure time? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 13 hours ago by CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You can consider this installment four of my previous question which is the third installment.

Throughout history, we have developed many methods of telling time. The most famous two examples being the clock and the sundial. The ancient Egyptians invented the clepsydra, an extremely simple device that uses dripping water as a way to tell how much time has passed. There are also, for example, hourglasses, which flow sand as a measurement of time.

Suppose, though, you were an intelligent dolphin and, for some reason, had to always have a time reference on you. Being under the water seems to present a challenge, for technology like clocks and hourglasses don't seem to be possible to make under the water, a clepsydra certainly wouldn't work since you can't pour water underwater, and a sundial wouldn't have the proper lighting. So you must improvise in order to find a way to keep track of time. How would you improvise in order to keep track of time.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jlow@beehaw.org 2 points 9 hours ago

I was also immediately thinking of tides as a time measurent. Relying on moon cycles gets you out of sync with solar years pretty quickly (os thqt important underwater? You probably do get seasonal changes?), I wonder if you could detect sunlight intensity changes or something and then do the whole solar / lunar calendar leap-day shebang we do ...