CEPIER
How would you tell an alien how tall you are?
Feet are someone's foot. Meters are a slice of the Earth. Seconds are a slice of a day. None of it means anything to someone who has never been here. CEPIER is built from two things every alien has too: an atom, and the speed of light.
Your height
The idea
It's less of a unit and more of an idea to ditch arbitrary numbers. It's also element agnostic. A cesium cepier tick is the amount of time that passes each tick of a cesium atom, and a hydrogen cepier tick is the amount of time that passes each tick of a hydrogen atom. And the distance is simply how far light travels in a tick.
A tick is time: one tick of the atom. A tock is length: how far light gets in one tick. No 24, no 60, no splitting the Earth into ten million pieces. Pick the atom for the job, the way you'd pick millimeters or kilometers today.
| 1 cesium cepier tick one tick of cesium-133, the atom in atomic clocks |
0.000000000108782775 s 9,192,631,770 in a second |
| 1 cesium cepier tock how far light goes in that tick |
3.2612 cm about 1.28 inches |
| 1 hydrogen cepier tick one tick of hydrogen, the 21 cm line |
0.000000000704024 s 1,420,405,752 in a second |
| 1 hydrogen cepier tock the length on the Pioneer plaque |
21.106 cm about 8.3 inches |
Convert anything
Someone already tried
In 1972 NASA launched Pioneer 10 with a plaque for whoever finds it. Next to the drawing of two people is the number 8, in binary, in units of the hydrogen line: 8 × 21 cm, about 5 ft 6 in. That's a hydrogen cepier tock, before it had a name. Binary is pretty arbitrary too, though.
Where this could go
Stick to cesium, since atomic clocks already use it. Use different atoms for different fidelities. Use logarithmic scales instead of prefixes like kilo and milli. Count days up the way we already count years, so "Tuesday" is never ambiguous. Get rid of leap years, and February. Maybe that's getting ahead of myself.