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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

It will be easier to boost the Earth’s spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.

It's been suggested that perhaps one way to find evidence of extrasolar life, would be to find exoplanets whose years are integer multiples of their rotational periods, i.e. they've done what you describe just to eliminate leap years and make their calendars easier.

But how do we know which base number system they're using!?

Mathematically that's irrelevant to finding planets with an integer ratio of days per year. Integers are still integers no matter what base you express them in.

What if the base isn't an integer?

Base e for life.

Or a prime based number system.

That is fascinating! Do you have a reference?

I think he might be sarcastic. There is no known method I know for measuring the rotational period of extrasolar planets, without having enough observational power to defiantly notice the astronomical engineering required to alter an inhabited planet’s rotation rate.

Actually I think if we follow the current trend in technology advances in astronomy, we will definitely be able to measure planetary rotation well before we have the angular resolution to spot anything of consequence on an exoplanet. We currently have the technology to measure stellar rotation bia Doppler shift. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_rotation

This technique will definitely be applied to exoplanets as the angular resolution and spectroscopic sensitivity are improved. In fact, improvements to both if these numbers are being relentlessly pursued by a veritable army of scientists around the world.

Spectral broadening only needs one pixel, and enough spectral sensitivity that the broadening isn’t entirely in the margin of error. We are pushing For ever more accurate spectral sensitivity as we try to use Doppler measurement to hunt for exoplanets.

Meanwhile the ongoing efforts to obtain greater angular resolution, has basically been one of the core pursuits of the astronomical community for centuries. We are building massive telescopes and advanced compensation systems in the form of adaptive optics to get the very best out of these telescopes.

So yeah I think we’re going to have rotation rate measures before we see much more than a pale blue dot.

"You see that big city past that mountain range? Use it as a marker to measure the planet's rotation."

If we measure this city's position then we'll know if there's life on the planet.

You get the joke.

In the Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu, the orbits of planets and moons in the solar system are altered to make colonization and terraforming easier.

Wrong. In the book they build the bunker stations behind Jupiter but NOT in orbit of jupiter or its moons and even that station keeping takes a tremendous energy.

That's actually a cool idea..

I would just change the duration of a second. It would be probably easier to change a few physics constants here and there than to fix all the broken code.

If only you were manipulating second only. You would also be manipulating metre, candela, and ampere, assuming old definition of SI, or metre, kilogram and kelvin assuming new definition of SI.

Can you explain how the duration of a second affects the metre?

Not OP, but "The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 second" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

But in that case, doesn't the "second" constant change (or the coefficient) and a metre remains the same length?

A meterstick would remain the same length, but the SI meter's length would change.

The duration of a second is defined using Caesium-133 [1], not using anything else like daytime or rotational speed. It's independent of such factors and will always be the same in a given frame of reference. No need to update those values.

edit: I think it will lead to the same or more problems because everyone would have to change all time-related constants. Easier to add a second to the day constant (because the day constant is a subset of the seconds constant, but the seconds constant affects many more aspects than just the day constant).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_caesium#Caesium-13...

Unless these physics constants are, well, constants put in the same code. How many ballistical systems treat ‘standard g’ as a variable? (hint: it depends on seconds squared.)

Someone should write a short story about this.

Code that assumes that is wrong today already. In fact there is no time.Day constant in the Go standard library

Probably not. https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/

I don’t care if this goes against HN guideline and if I am downvoted, but that was the geekiest joke of the millennia :D

Geeks make it go around yo.

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