As Nick noted, being not technological, their own body clocks would be about all they could use.Steve3007 wrote: ↑January 13th, 2020, 7:21 amGreta wrote:A thought experiment:
It's the far future and humanity has been replaced by beings like HG Wells's Morlocks. They are intelligent and time-aware, but not as intelligent as current humans. They are physically robust and adaptable, capable of living underground for extended periods.
A rogue black hole hurls the Earth from its orbit into interstellar space. Due to (fanciful) counter-spin forces, the planet's rotation rapidly slows down.
The Morlocks retreat to their underground lairs full-time. Without orbits and rotations, how do they tell the time? What is time to them? Is their time just an idea?It's an interesting thought experiment isn't it? As Nick says, if they already have that history of using natural, celestial clocks then they could probably abstract from that and retain their notion of time. They could then, no doubt, devise other clocks. But if those other clocks gradually drifted out from synchronisation with celestial (natural) clocks (as our clocks and calendars do) they'd have no way of knowing that and, arguably, it wouldn't matter. Unless they emerge again one day.NickGaspar wrote:It is an idea based on a previous observation they had. Now they will have to based it on an new one...their biological clocks.
They will be forced, as a society, to organize and take care their needs (sleep,food)which are regulated by their biological clocks in order to survive and flourish
It's also interesting to consider the extent to which human development of notions like time has been driven by our constant, very direct exposure to that vast clock in the sky: the heavenly bodies moving overhead with quite precise regularity. Through the vast majority of our history, when we set up camp for the night with nothing but firelight, that natural clock would have been un-ignorable. And archaeology suggests that we certainly didn't ignore it.
If it were possible for intelligent life to develop without ever having been exposed to that, at any point in their evolutionary history, I wonder what conceptions of time would it have.
They would not be able to develop the kind of precise "time technology" that we have with Caesium atom decay, so it would be hard to imagine them having the ability to progress. However, in the absence of time synced to other natural phenomena, their circadian rhythm might become more precise.
Then again, even with celestial cues, there is (was? It's hard to know these days) an Amazonian tribe with a completely different approach to time https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13452711
If your "world" is small enough, you can discard abstract concepts. In a way it's more realistic, because X in the future is not the same as X in the past. It's something new, that can be given any label.
Given that people on the same planet and the same species can come up with such different models (or lack) it boggles the mind to imagine how any intelligent species in other parts of the universe might conceptualise time. A binary star system, no moons, multiple moons and differing rotation rates would throw our everyday assumptions about time out the window.