Alien Time

Last year I was working on "The Planets 2010", another show with astronomy elements in it. I love this stuff. This show was a recreation of Holst’s "The Planets" by schoolchildren, with the wonderful Dave Trouton leading the project and composing new versions with the kids. I made effects to illustrate some voiceovers about what we know of each Planet. Holst’s music was inspired by astrology, but we’re inspired by science and are trying - with limited resources and boundless enthusiasm - to show some of the beauty of the planets and some of the fascination of the science.

One of the facts always quoted is the length of a planet’s day and year. I had no idea that Venus’s day was 225 earth days long for example. But it drove home the geocentricity of all of our measures of time. The 24 hour day is based on the earth’s rotation, and the year on our orbit. Distance has the earth as a reference too of course - the Astronomical Unit or AU is the distance from the Sun to the earth, and the light year of course is bound up to the earth year.

I wondered what common frame of reference we could use to discuss time with an alien civilisation, should we bump into one on the way to the shops, and want to arrange to meet for coffee later. We could make an assumption that their own units of time derived from their own home planet’s characteristics, as ours do from the earth’s. What could we use to translate our time to theirs and vice versa. If they gave us fifteen squargs to hand over all the jaffa cakes on earth, or face obliteration. Would we need to panic and all run down to the shops immediately, or could we write a leisurely letter to McVities explaining they’re going out of business in thirteen point two years?

I suppose we would need to look to atomic clocks to get a common frame of reference - an atom of caesium will resonate at the same frequency for us as for them, and then we’re left with establishing numerical units. How many squargs in a floop?

I note with suspicion that whenever the Daleks had a countdown in their charming units “Rels” the pacing of the countdowns suggested that the rel was either a) suspiciously close to one earth second or b) A variable quantity of time which was proportional to the amount of danger the Doctor was in. I’ve worked this out on a napkin and can cheerfully announce that the Dalek “rel” = 1.3 “plotdevices”.