History Main / UniversalUniverseTime

A SubTrope of StandardTimeUnits and a sister-trope to TimeZonesDoNotExist. Contrast TwoOfYourEarthMinutes, the standard HandWave to get around this.

* {{Justified}} in ''Manga/VenusWars'': as Venus' day is much longer than Earth's, the colonists use Earth time measurements for comodity.

* In ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'' people have given up on trying to establish any such system, even with the help of wormholes.

* ''{{Transformers}}'' in general plays around with the wording. Whether or not they follow Earth's calendar and time standards is never really expressed, but they use phrases like "One Solar Cycle" to represent 1 day or a Mega Cycle to represent a month (or possibly a year.)

* In Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/{{Foundation}}'' Series as "evidence" for the theory of humanity originating from one planet, when Earth is lost and forgotten. Not that everyone accepts this explanation for the length/number of hours, days and years.

* ''WesternAnimation/TrippingTheRift''.

* In the first episode of ''LightNovel/BodaciousSpacePirates'' Misa consults a watch that measures Galactic Standard Time, and finds that it rolled over to the next day during dinner.

** Justified in the ''Literature/JediAcademyTrilogy''. While on a secret base on the planet Anoth safeguarding the baby Anakin Solo from Imperial kidnapping attempts, Winter insists on setting the clocks to Coruscant time as the base is located in an area that never gets any brighter than twilight.

Just to put it in perspective for you: One "day" on Venus, our closest neighbor planet, is equivalent to approximately 117 Earth days because its rotation is so much slower than ours. On the other hand, one "year" on Venus is equivalent to 225 Earth days because Venus moves a bit faster, and its orbital path is shorter than Earth's. (The 243 Earth days figure you may see bandied about as the length of a Venusian day is its sidereal day. The mean solar day is shorter due to Venus's retrograde rotation, whereas planets that rotate prograde have a solar day that is longer than the sidereal day.) It gets weirder -- one Mercurian day is about 176 Earth days, or precisely ''two'' Mercurian ''years''. (The precise 1:2 ratio is due to a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance.) Yes, that's right -- on Mercury, a day is two years. (Feel free to speculate about whether dates like April p.m. have any meaning.)

* Apparently played straight in ''Anime/LegendOfGalacticHeroes,'' wherein ''the entire Milky Way Galaxy'' seems to operate on one standardized time zone.

* Lampshaded in the ''Film/SpiritsOfTheForce'' series of Star Wars fan films. In the second installment, Kyle asks Jan about the time, and Jan replies telling him the standard time on Coruscant. Then Kyle asks for CURRENT time. Jan looks back. Beat. "We're in SPACE."

And this is ''before'' you take [[RealityIsOutToLunch relativity]] into account: depending on gravity and velocity, time can actually proceed at different rates at different points in the universe.

* In VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}, every civilization in the galaxy uses the same Gregorian-style calendar, with the start date always being 2200.01.01, though it's abstracted slightly in that every month is exactly thirty days (passing as thirty seconds of real time).

* This is played straight in ''ComicBook/AlbedoErmaFelnaEDF'', when all the dates, regardless the planet the characters are in, are stated in a single unified calendar, the Standard Calendar (SD). There's no explanation for planet-specific time measures in the comic, through.

* In ''StarWars'', the Galactic Republic (and the later Galactic Empire) uses a 368 day year calendar that uses the capital planet, Coruscant, as the standard, though mostly on Fleet ships and for the purpose of scheduling. Other notable deviation from the Earth calendar includes a 5 day week and a 7 week month. Early EU material mentioned 10-month years, but this later became 12 for general understandability. Five times seven times twelve gets you more than three hundred sixty-eight. It's ten months, plus a few holidays and festival weeks that don't belong to any month...which is even worse to try to remember than just ten months.
** Because Faster Than Light travel is (near-) universally employed, special relativity is by-passed and Universal Universe Time is exactly what results. Apparently.
** It's not [[FasterThanLightTravel Hyperspace]] that lets the StarWars universe have standardized time, it's the [[SubspaceAnsible Hyperwave Transciever and Subspace Radio]], which allow literally instantaneous communication between any two places in broadcast range. When a communications relay in a strategically important location is destroyed and a message needs to be sent there in the Literature/NewJediOrder series, this becomes a plot point. As the second-fastest thing the protagonists have after the currently-down instant communications, a starship--the ''Millennium Falcon'', naturally--gets sent to deliver the message instead. This opportunity is conveniently used to deliver some {{exposition}} about how the communications systems work in ''Franchise/StarWars'', and they ''can'', actually, coordinate clocks across the galaxy with the clocks in the Senate Hall or the Imperial-slash-Chancellor's Palace on Coruscant. And they ''do'', since any place that's not on the surface of a planet uses that timezone of that planet as a standard.
** The use of "universal time" is complained about in one of the ''Literature/XWingSeries'' books, when one pilot (an escaped prisoner) realized he's stranded on a planet that's so idiotically in thrall to the Empire as to set its clocks to Coruscant Standard Time. [[spoiler:He shortly realizes that he's actually been on Coruscant itself the whole time.]]
** In the [[WesternAnimation/StarWarsTheCloneWars The Clone Wars]], troopers are heard using the term "rotation" to refer to the local day.

* ''Literature/TheHanSoloTrilogy'': Coruscant provides "Galactic Standard Time" with other planets' days etc. given in its units. However, the local time is also provided. In any case, Han finds it difficult to adjust while on a planet whose day is only ten "standard hours" long (far less than his home world, apparently).

* Averted in ''Fanfic/RocketshipVoyager''. The clocks on the eponymous rocketship have two dials--one set to the atomic clock on the [[MasterComputer Computer Deck]], the other adjusted to the standard time of the nearest space station or planetary [=LowPort=]. When they end up on the other side of the galaxy, they also have to convert [[{{microts}} alien measurements of time]] to something they're familiar with.

* In VideoGame/Stellaris, every civilization in the galaxy uses the same Gregorian-style calendar, with the start date always being 2200.01.01, though it's abstracted slightly in that every month is exactly thirty days (passing as thirty seconds of real time).

*** And the Standard time is not exactly, but close enough to human time that people use them interchangeably. Alternatively, as Shepard has been in the military for years, it's quite possible the references to years are actually to the Galactic Standard and not Earth years. The game offers all three possibilities but never gives a definitive answer

** Averted elsewhere. Each selectable planet has a description, and none of them has anything approaching an Earth day/year. Also, the human in Eternity on Illium mentions that "salarian years are like dog years."
*** Although that last may simply be a reference to the salarian life-span being only about half that of a human.

* ''LightNovel/CrestOfTheStars'' has at least one planet with an odd example. Since it was terraformed and opened for colonization by the space faring Abh they just used a single timezone with a 24 hour day that ignores the local day/night cycle, so 11 in the morning could be sunset, sunrise or the middle of the night depending on where on the planet you are.

A SubTrope of StandardTimeUnits. Contrast TwoOfYourEarthMinutes, the standard HandWave to get around this.

** In stories set on Moab III, such as ''Fanfic/InThePresenceOfHeavenWouldYouChooseHell'', the locals have additional hours on their daily clock due to Moab's slower rotation.

* Averted in ''VideoGame/NoMansSky''. Where each "day" varies in lenght depending the planet you are on. In game each cycle is called a sol and currently there is no universal time measuring unit.

** It's not [[FasterThanLightTravel Hyperspace]] that lets the StarWars universe have standardized time, it's the [[SubspaceAnsible Hyperwave Transciever and Subspace Radio]], which allow literally instantaneous communication between any two places in broadcast range. When a communications relay in a strategically important location is destroyed and a message needs to be sent there in the Literature/NewJediOrder series, this becomes a plot point. As the second-fastest thing the protagonists have after the currently-down instant communications, a starship--the ''Millennium Falcon'', naturally--gets sent to deliver the message instead. This opportunity is conveniently used to deliver some {{Exposition}} about how the communications systems work in ''Franchise/StarWars'', and they ''can'', actually, coordinate clocks across the galaxy with the clocks in the Senate Hall or the Imperial-slash-Chancellor's Palace on Coruscant. And they ''do'', since any place that's not on the surface of a planet uses that timezone of that planet as a standard.
** The use of "universal time" is complained about in one of the ''VideoGame/RogueSquadron'' books, when one pilot (an escaped prisoner) realized he's stranded on a planet that's so idiotically in thrall to the Empire as to set its clocks to Coruscant Standard Time. [[spoiler:He shortly realizes that he's actually been on Coruscant itself the whole time.]]