Humanity without time keeping devices

[hongi]

ROB destroys all artificial time keeping devices, all man-made instruments like clocks, sundials, water clocks, watches, calendars etc. Anyone who attempts to recreate such a device will die of spontaneous combustion.

He reprograms computers so that they no longer have the ability to keep time. Electronic methods of keeping time are forbidden.

ROB undertakes a massive censorship program. Every piece of writing that tells you how to keep time are burned. People who try to write such info down will die a fiery death.

The above changes will last for at least 1000 years, possibly permanently. What happens to humanity?

[Serafina]

Most modern technology stops working, because it requires time-keeping. That alone would put us back into somewhere of the 19th-century at the least.

Most forms of modern work - such as in factories - also becomes much, much harder to organize. Without even sundials you can only tell time very roughly.

[Imperial528]

Do the internal signal clocks in electronic devices count as a time-keeping device? Because if so, then every clocked digital device (Pretty much all of them) will be simultaneously destroyed. In fact, we'd pretty much be left with simple logic devices and purely analog machines, like simple motors (servo motors will stop functioning correctly, if at all). So ROB shouldn't bother with reprogramming the computers, because if they fall under this, they all stop working. Or worse.

Oh, and planes* will fall out of the sky and such. And the power grid will collapse in short time. Essentially, all of modern civilization will stop working. Just this will bring us back to early 20th century level.

Also, I predict a good many people dying of spontaneous combustion while attempting to make a sundial using sticks in their yard, or a calendar by writing down how many days have passed.

*Except for planes that are built using older techniques, so those small planes with prop engines, most of them should still work. But the radios they have to communicate with air traffic control probably won't. And even if they did, the traffic radar will stop working, too, or at the least the computers which display the output would.

[hongi]

Do the internal signal clocks in electronic devices count as a time-keeping device?

Why would it? Do we use it to calculate time?

I'm entirely ignorant of electrical engineering I'm afraid.

[Serafina]

Oh, calendars are affected too?
Yeah, then we're totally screwed. Because without a calendar, farming becomes VERY hard. You need to know when you can sow and when to harvest, and not knowing that in advance and therefore making the right preparations will severely reduce harvests. That was the main reason we invented calendars, after all.
So say hallo to a world-wide famine, and probably the inability to sustain any population of more than half a billion on our planet.

[Imperial528]

Do the internal signal clocks in electronic devices count as a time-keeping device?

Why would it? Do we use it to calculate time?

I'm entirely ignorant of electrical engineering I'm afraid.

They keep the parts of the circuit working on the same timescale, essentially. So in a way, yes, they do keep time, by making it uniform across a circuit.

[hongi]

Oh, calendars are affected too?
Yeah, then we're totally screwed. Because without a calendar, farming becomes VERY hard. You need to know when you can sow and when to harvest, and not knowing that in advance and therefore making the right preparations will severely reduce harvests. That was the main reason we invented calendars, after all.
So say hallo to a world-wide famine, and probably the inability to sustain any population of more than half a billion on our planet.

I'm not disputing what you said about a decrease in population, but for the farming - can't you do that just by observing the natural seasons? I mean, I understand it won't be very accurate, but surely we would have used the seasons just as much as our calendars throughout our agricultural history.

[Serafina]

Well yes, you can do it. Just nowhere near as well. Some farmers will screw it up. More importantly they'll be unable to plan for important, often time-critical steps in advance.
You basically shift from a system where you can both plan and react, to a system where you can only react. Which is a very bad thing.


Oh, and another thing:
Depending on how strict the rules are, every single machine that works in regular intervals will be destroyed. After all, you could use it to keep time - if a train arrives about once per hour (even if its a pure steam train) you can keep rough time with it, for example. Or maybe the machine in a factory does something every 2.5 minutes - so it blows up.
If we go that far we go before industrialization, just with worse agriculture and less structure in our society.

Navigation of ships is another thing that will become very hard - certainly near impossible with any reliability over open oceans. Because determining your position requires either landmarks or knowledge of what time it is.

[Ziggy Stardust]

All life on the planet dies, because ROB will also have to block out the sun itself, which can be used as a measure of time (both hours since sunrise/before sunset, and as a marker of days).

[Junghalli]

All life on the planet dies, because ROB will also have to block out the sun itself, which can be used as a measure of time (both hours since sunrise/before sunset, and as a marker of days).

It could turn Earth into a synchronously rotating planet with a near-circular orbit and zero obliquity and move it and the sun (and no other solar system bodies) to a parallel universe with no stars. Should be pretty much impossible to tell time with celestial objects now.

Of course, the weather is going to be totally different now, what with a permanent day and night side now and all (though still habitable on the day side, I think - there was a simulation done of it, though I don't have the link to the paper right now), but I bet this scenario would screw us over anyway.

[Imperial528]

ROB destroys all artificial time keeping devices, all man-made instruments like clocks, sundials, water clocks, watches, calendars etc. Anyone who attempts to recreate such a device will die of spontaneous combustion.

Emphasis mine. The Sun and stars and moon will be fine, as will time keeping using them, the only problem is that we will have no way to use them as exact measures of time, at least not without carefully learning how to track time in your head and then teaching every subsequent generation on how to do this. Even then, we'll have it down to just hours, and no way of recording it.

Say, does this also mean that things such as Stonehenge, and all those other monuments that line up with the sun and moon on regular intervals will also be destroyed? They may not keep time on a daily basis, but they are very accurate for the purpose of annual events.

Or, for that matter, any monument that could be used as a sun dial, such as any obelisk ever that stands in a relatively clear area and has a prominent shadow.

[Mr Bean]

ROB could introduce an unstable spin orbit to Earth so we don't have a twenty four hour day so some days are 22, some 21 some 24 to make sundials useless. Or alternatively... clouds.

[Terralthra]

ROB must also destroy anything with a pendulum or pendulum-like (gravity-affected spring) device, and/or vary the gravitational constant of the universe or the mass of Terra.

Yeah, this is getting increasingly more contrived. Time is a fundamental dimension of the universe and scale along which processes engage. In practical terms, I could use a fire, a thermometer, and a barrel of water to measure time, by calculating the necessary temperature change to boil water from room temperature, the heat transfer efficiency of the pot apparatus, and just sit there boiling water and shouting out the time to anyone in earshot. Any process with a known (or manipulable) reaction rate and common ingredients could be used likewise for measuring seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, or even years. To eliminate knowledge of how to do this would be to destroy more or less all scientific knowledge, and keep it that way.

[Eulogy]

So in other words, ROB has basically murderized civilization as we know it and if humanity survives in any form (which is doubtful) it will be Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

ROB is literally a genocidal monster. Hell, it could be omnicidal depending on how far it has to take its goal of not making time itself measurable. In which case, there's no point discussing this stupid RAR further.

[Ultonius]

An obelisk might be all right as long as you don't make it a sundial, i.e. you can't create a dial face around it to mark hours. You would have to memorize what shadow positions correspond to what time, and it wouldn't be much more precise than early morning, late morning, noon, early afternoon, late afternoon. It would eliminate the risk of blindness from looking at the sun to tell time, but that would be its only real advantage.

[Ahriman238]

We go back to a simple separation of morning, afternoon and evening, with noon being when the sun is directly overhead? As opposed to an abstract time on a watch so everything can be neatly standardized.

I would probably be one of the one flambeed for trying to fashion a stick sundial.

Oh, and all the death and technology destruction previously mentioned. I think even my pocket calculator will be destroyed.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem with morning/afternoon/evening is that it doesn't solve the calendar problem.

People have been keeping track of calendars on tally sticks and whatnot since before civilization even existed; I can only assume they had their reasons.

[PeZook]

You CAN do agriculture without a calendar. It will just massively suck and be next to useless.