It is a curious thing - I think for the foreseeable future, we’d likely still track age via Earth years for the sake of avoiding this kind of thing. I wonder if/when we do colonize, how long would it take for the Martians to actually switch. How much would our cultures have drifted by that point?
And a related shower thought - until relatively recently (late 1960s), any definition we used to track time has been crazy localized to our planet, compared to other things in math and science where many of those concepts would still work the same elsewhere
A lot of science fiction writers try to address the problem of time when humanity becomes a space-faring race. Star Trek has the idea of a “Stardate” and instructed the script writers to just fucking make it up,
For example, 1313.5 is twelve o’clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon of the next day. Each percentage point (sic) is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of one day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don’t worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode."
Meanwhile, Asimov in the Robots / Foundation universe, everyone still uses the idea of a 365-day / 24-hour day “year”, even if no one remembers Earth (except a R. Daneel Olivaw and a few others).
And Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy does what OP notes – Martian years are longer, and the societies diverge pretty rapidly, within a generation, for a whole host of reasons.
It is a curious thing - I think for the foreseeable future, we’d likely still track age via Earth years for the sake of avoiding this kind of thing. I wonder if/when we do colonize, how long would it take for the Martians to actually switch. How much would our cultures have drifted by that point?
And a related shower thought - until relatively recently (late 1960s), any definition we used to track time has been crazy localized to our planet, compared to other things in math and science where many of those concepts would still work the same elsewhere
A lot of science fiction writers try to address the problem of time when humanity becomes a space-faring race. Star Trek has the idea of a “Stardate” and instructed the script writers to just fucking make it up,
Meanwhile, Asimov in the Robots / Foundation universe, everyone still uses the idea of a 365-day / 24-hour day “year”, even if no one remembers Earth (except a R. Daneel Olivaw and a few others).
And Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy does what OP notes – Martian years are longer, and the societies diverge pretty rapidly, within a generation, for a whole host of reasons.
This is actually how it’s handled in the science fiction universes. Star Wars for example uses Corusant time as the standard across the galaxy.