What If A Minute Was 100 Seconds? | Unveiled

What If a Minute Was 100 Seconds?

Every day, we're granted eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds to work with. That’s eating, sleeping, drinking, watching YouTube videos - everything! And it all-too-often feels like there just isn't enough time available. So, is the solution to change how we measure time in the first place?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if a minute was 100 seconds?

Why do we even perceive time in the way we do, counting sixty seconds for a minute rather than one hundred? One major reason is plain divisibility, with the number 60 boasting more dividing factors than 100, making it generally the more flexible option.

Nevertheless, were we to switch to a minute equaling 100 seconds, we could still use a lot of the same phrases as we currently do… Only the definitions of those phrases would have to change, and our inherent perception of time would need to alter, as well. For example, today, when someone says; “It’s a quarter to three”, we automatically know that it’s fifteen minutes until three o’ clock. However, when we switch to a minute equaling one hundred seconds, that fifteen minutes of “standard” time would shrink to only nine minutes of “new” time.

Now, suppose we also shifted to one hundred minutes equaling one hour. “A quarter to three” now means that there’s a whopping twenty-five 100-second-minutes until three o’ clock! While, back in the standard 60-second set-up, that length of time would actually equal 41 minutes and 36 seconds. Either way, though, there’s quite a bit of extra time to kill!

If we stick with a standard 24-hour clock, we’d now have days that last just over eight-and-a-half hours (but still equate to roughly the same amount of time the Earth takes to rotate on its axis). However, if we wanted to continue with the metric theme and introduce a 10-hour day, (so that’s 10 hours made up of 100 minutes made up of 100 seconds), one day would now take significantly longer than one turn of the Earth. Clearly, it’s a mind-bending prospect! So, naturally, it could cause chaos.

All across society, fundamental changes would need to happen whenever a second is used to measure anything. We’d have to realign our idea of miles or kilometers per hour, meaning widespread redesigns for cars, other vehicles and countless other machines. In hospitals, the standard “beats per minute” measurement would need redefining, too… While, as BPM is also used by musicians, the change would also affect how we read music and keep time.

But the upheaval across several industries would run deeper than simply the switch in minute-length… Because a one hundred-second structure would also affect the calendar, which we use to keep track of the seasons. Especially in the case of a new ten-hour-day, the new minute-length would mean our concept of “a day” changes, prompting us to calculate an entirely new, now-not-necessarily-twelve-month calendar… Which could prove disastrous for farming and food industries. Keeping abreast of weather conditions would be more important than ever to ensure crop survival; converting to a day/night cycle that’s measured in a completely different way could prove very difficult; while, even best before dates on food packages in supermarkets would need to be revamped.

While regular periods of light and dark would obviously still happen with or without 100 seconds a minute, the change in time could also threaten sleep patterns. Typically, we’re supposed to get around eight hours of sleep every night, or twenty-eight thousand eight hundred seconds. But that number drops to just under three hours if a minute’s 100 seconds and an hour’s 100 minutes. Sure, the same amount of real time will’ve passed either way, but how we measure and speak about it drastically alters - which could mess up our circadian rhythms, at least in the beginning.

Of course, one of the simpler and more obvious changes would center on the devices we currently use to tell the time in the first place. All traditional, analogue clock faces - from the humble wristwatch to iconic buildings like London’s Elizabeth Tower - would now be redundant, discarded as relics of a bygone age. Meanwhile, all digital clock faces would need to be reprogrammed, or else ditched as well.

That means that almost every computer device would be affected, including smartphones, tablets and laptops - both in terms of their actual time display, and also in how they’re specifically programmed to work. Given how dependent society is on its computers, anything that puts them all out of action brings a whole new wave of concern. Even the smallest error in a device’s digital coding could cause big problems… In fact, the world was actually worried about something fairly similar not too long ago; the Y2K Millennium Bug.

In the build-up to New Year’s Eve 1999 - as the planet prepared for a new millennium - many believed that the date-change required of our increasingly computerised devices would bring about some kind of global ruin. The fear was that the switch for machines displaying only the last two digits of a specified year - from ninety-nine to zero-zero - would cause them to recognise the wrong date completely; the year 1900 instead of the year 2000. Business owners were especially scared about the effect the transition would have on the economy. Luckily, most concerns were addressed, products were updated, and a major, global disaster was avoided.

But the Millennium Bug was really only a true cause for concern for one moment; the first seconds of the year 2000. Were we to switch to a 100-second minute, then every single second of every single day would require permanent, ongoing realignment. And, clearly, we live in a very different, significantly more digitalized age than even just two decades ago.

During the switchover, businesses big and small could suffer a massive number of errors including in simple transactions, their long-term records and their day-today operations. Transportation systems all around the world would also struggle to keep time at first, and even when the timetables, route-planners and GPS maps had all been adjusted to the new time-scale, everybody using them would need to reprogram their own thought processes in order to understand them. Even social media would be affected, since sites like YouTube and Facebook show how long-ago posts were made. And all types of media would need to recalibrate duration times on videos, songs, podcasts - basically anything that’s measured in time. As for the stock market, during the moment of switchover especially, a major crash could prove almost inevitable.

The probable chaos in transportation services shines light on arguably the biggest issue of all, though; society’s general ability to think in terms of a 100-second minute. As something as fundamental as a unit of time is suddenly taken away from us, almost all of us would be prone to forgetting appointments, turning up incredibly late or incredibly early for meetings, missing the bus, burning our dinner, and misunderstanding even the simplest of instructions. So much so, we’d probably see an all-new niche job market emerge where people are employed to help everybody else maintain at least a little punctuality, including a type of town crier announcing as and when every hour begins.

Regardless, mistakes would be almost inevitable, with some proving much more significant than others. On the one hand, you might accidentally miss the start of a movie or set your alarm for much too late; on the other, a doctor could misread your pulse, air traffic control could mistakenly guide two planes to land at the same time, or the computers and devices you depend on for daily life could irretrievably crash. At best, it’d be frustrating; at worst, catastrophic. And it’d take us a long, long time to totally convert. But that’s what would happen if a minute was one hundred seconds!