History Main / Microts

*** Another ''MenInBlack'' joke:\\
'''Zed:''' ''The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You'll get used to it. Or you'll have a psychotic episode.''

*** Another ''MenInBlack'' joke:
->'''Zed:''' ''The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You'll get used to it. Or you'll have a psychotic episode.''

* In IsaacAsimov's Robot City series (by Rob Chilson, William F. Wu, Arthur Byron Cover, Michael P. Kube-McDowell and Mike McQuay) the robots use normal time units, but since the days in the titular city are of a different length, the human heroes get metric watches dividing the day into decades and centades.

** An early episode has Aeryn say that something will take 180 arns, which Crichton says is four minutes...so, unless his math is off, a microt is a bit longer than a second.

* The planet in the ''StarTrekVoyager'' episode “Time and Again” used rotations, intervals, and fractions. And Arabic digits (that's 1 2 3, not ١ ٢ ٣).

'''Cat:''' ''5 hanaka! That only gives us 28 hours.''

* The giant, moving [[BaseOnWheels city on rails]] in ''TheInvertedWorld'' uses "miles" as a measure of time. Though initially confusing, this is eventually explained when it is revealed that the City has to move 1/10 of a mile per day in order to survive; thus, a character might say "a mile ago" to mean "ten days ago".

* {{Gor}} (based a lot on Barsoom) measures 80 Ihn (seconds) to the Ehn, 40 Ehn (minutes) to the Ahn, and 20 Ahn (hours) to the day.

* The planet in the StarTrekVoyager episode “Time and Again” used rotations, intervals, and fractions. And Arabic digits (that's 1 2 3, not ١ ٢ ٣).

* {{Exalted}} has a year... that's made up of 15 months and 5 days that are "outside the year", called Calibration. Also, the month is made of exactly 28 days, no matter what month it is, unlike our months. (makes sense, since they use lunar months, unlike us who use Roman months and calendar, where [[ExecutiveMeddling every Roman emperor wanted a month dedicated to himself and wanted that month to be longer than normal]]. Which leads to July and August having 31 days, while poor February is left with merely 28 (ok, 28.25)...

*** Another Men In Black joke:

->'''Kay:''' ''The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You'll get used to it. Or you'll have a psychotic episode.''

* Starting with ''StarTrekIIITheSearchForSpock'' and continuing on at least one episode of ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', Klingon Battlecuiser crews call out the distance to their targets in "Kellecams". (Or "killicams". Or "kilicams". There doesn't seem to me much agreement on the spelling.)

* In the BronzeAge, ''{{Superman}}'' comics stated that Kryptonian time was divided into "dendars", their equivalent of a minute that consists of one hundred seconds.

* In ''Babylon5'', Drazi cycle not Drazi week. Cycle Drazi ''year''. It can be assumed that almost all species have their own time units, but the Babylon station runs on Earth time.

** The show hung a Lampshade on it in the episode ''Greetings From Earth'' where other human space colonists used seconds, minutes, and hours while Apollo said "Wait just a centon!" trying to figure it out.

* [[{{Babylon 5}} Drazi cycle not Drazi week. Cycle Drazi ''year'']]. It can be assumed that almost all species have their own time units, but the Babylon station runs on Earth time.

'''Zed:''' ''One hour.''\\
'''Jay:''' ''One hour... then what?''

!!A merge of this page with FantasticMeasurementSystem has been proposed. Discuss [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=9y7r7ffe0ju50ux55x2swlg6 here]] or vote in the crowner [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/SingleProposition/MicrotsAndFantasticMeasurementSystem here]].

* {{MercedesLackey}}'s books that take place in Valdemar call an hour a "candlemark". In her ''Obsidian Trilogy'', characters from a certain city reckon time in units of "bells", each of which is two hours.

* The people of the ''{{Metroid}}'' universe use "cycles" as a unit of time. It is unclear whether a "cycle" is roughly equivalent to a day or to a year.
** It's probably not a day, as Space Pirate logs often talk about projects being developed over the course of a few cycles (it probably took them more than a few days to figure out how to infuse their troops with Phazon, especially as it took multiple failed attempts) and U'mos in ''Metroid Prime 2'' is mentioned to be several centicycles old (technically it should be centocycles, but that's [[UnitConfusion a different trope entirely]]). It's probably somewhere between a few months and about a year.

** "Yahren" sounds a lot like the German "Jahre," which means... "years."
*** Heck, it's ''exactly'' the same (in pronunciation) as the dative form of "Jahre": "Jahren." Factor in the fact that "J" says "Y" in German and that the plural of "Yahren" in old BSG is "Yahren," and...DAMMIT, DID THEY JUST RIP OFF GERMAN? Yes. Yes they did.
** And of course a micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter.
*** Which would mean that when the Cylon raiders were "ninety microns and closing," they were 0.09 millimeters away. ;-) But seriously, folks, the Viper coordinator probably meant the raiders would arrive in 90 seconds on their present course and speed.

* In ''DoctorWho'', Daleks use "rels" to indicate a short period of time, which varies between about one and two seconds from one episode to another.