We have a 24 hour day. An hour is 60 minutes long and a minute is 60 seconds. A second is about as long as it takes to snap your fingers twice. This is the time you have to work, study or whatever you do, eat, exercise, commute, shop, cook, wash your clothes, wash yourself (with soap and water, not by rubbing crystals on your genitals) and sleep. Got kids? Well now you have to make time for them too. If you want to get any partying in, you have to find a time when you have a free evening and don't need to be anywhere early the next day. My point is we don't have time to scratch our arses.
I can imagine somewhere in the vastness of the universe there's a planet which rotates just a little bit slower. Why should its days be 24 hours? Why should its hours be 60 minutes? I'm not going to be planetist so maybe it has a 50 hour cycle and an hour is 100 minutes. This planet has an atmosphere like Earth, a mild climate, electromagnetic field, supports life and is a little bigger and has plenty of space for everyone. There's actually enough time to do more than just what one needs. Life is calm and everyone just lives it up.
Would a planet with longer days and nights than Earth be better?
Yeah I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have longer days like in the summer with shorter nights and It would also allow us to rely more on solar power too so it’s giving us more time during the day
It doesn't matter. We have artificial light here on Earth so you can stay up 24 hours a day/night whatever you like. Or stay up at night and sleep in the day. It's more about needing sleep than the rotation of the planet.
And it's fine the way it is, where it is. It requires us to manage our time better, and appreciate it. I have realized that all the things I love to do, there is no way I can do them all every day, or even every week. I have to pick and choose and make time for some things and make some decisions about what is important. I think that's a good skill/trait to have, better than having everything and never learning discipline.
Of course not, at least in the foreseeable future because we have evolved so that our biorhythms cycles around 24 hours. When the moon was formed, the rotation of the earth was as little as 1.5 to 5 hours and the length of the rotation of the earth will continue to slow down as the angular momentum of the earth is transferred to the moon. However, if you want a longer day, just wait because the length of a day currently increases by about 1.8 milliseconds every century.
A 26 hour day will occur in about 40 million years. It will be almost 100 times that long before the sun turns into a red giant and swallows up the earth.
I agree it is highly unlikely our species, as we know it, will exist in 40 million years. However, it is not unlikely that some of the species we evolve into will exist. By then, if we don't destroy ourselves or if something doesn't kill us, we will have colonized the galaxy and, since the environment on every planet we colonize will be different fromr earth will will have evolved into hundreds or more likely thousands of species.
We are used to earth day and night cycle and on the other planet we are going to be used to this ones day and night cycle. And there would still be complains about not having enough time.
It might feel better for a while, but who knows, someday we would still be complaining about not having enough time in the hands...🤔 Loved your question!
Yes that's true. I was going to include an explanation about how the life on that particular planet might have evolved circadian rhythms that match a 50 hour cycle rather than the 24 we're used to and how if humanity was able to colonize it, we would eventually adapt biologically but I didn't want to go into too many details.
I can't anticipate what the effects would be to the Earth's atmosphere, flora, chemistry, and biology if things like that change but I can guess it won't be good for the species that evolved for a 24 hour cycle.
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