Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/10606
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As we've seen on earth, communities count time in reference to key events -- the creation of the world, the birth of a new religious figure, the beginning of a king's reign (these ones have less staying power), and so on. When calendar systems encounter each other (I say the year is 5774; you say it's 2014; now what?), some sort of reconciliation happens.

If your colonists have the notion of a 24-hour day regardless of the solar events they're now experiencing, _and if they know they went through a time-warping anomaly_, then it's not unreasonable for them to start counting in those days from that event. So they arrive in, say, year 1, month 10, day 3 AA (after anomaly), and go from there.

If they don't know they went through an anomaly, then nothing changes for them -- they count time as they always did. That they're _wrong_ isn't known to _them_, only to the _reader_.

Either way, if they went millions of years into the past and there's no relevant tech magic, they'll live the rest of their lives never having to reconcile their calendar. The reader, on the other hand, will be tracking a story with two timelines and two dating systems, but this probably isn't a burden because those timelines don't interact. Plus, we've all read stories told partially in the present and partially in flashbacks without getting confused about time; this is similar.

Original score: 4