I'd say that for time, the second is the only thing people can really relate to. With a bit of practice everybody can count seconds. We cannot related to minutes, hours, day, etc. without an external time keeping source.
The other thing worth point out is that, though we have centi-, deci-, deca-, and hecto- they get only limited use in practice.
Very few distances are specified in deca- or hectometers.
Very few things are decagrams. There is a metric ounce and pound. But hectogram is not used.
So for distance, we have meter, kilometer. For mass, gram, kilogram, metric tonne.
Within the same system, we could easily deal with kiloseconds and megaseconds.
As far as I know, nobdy uses deciseconds as something other than a weird way of saying 100 milliseconds.
In informal speech, the number of zeros is used as estimate of precision. Using prefixes to specify precision is way too confusing.
Within the metric system, 10 kilosecond would roughly be the same as 3 hours. With a single day, everybody could easily adapt to kiloseconds. The problem starts when you have to create a system of timekeeping based on metric second.
> I'd say that for time, the second is the only thing people can really relate to. With a bit of practice everybody can count seconds.
Not really. Games like "one Mississippi" are fun approximations, but they aren't terribly accurate. Also this gets very close to the argument that foot is a better unit for length than meter because you can more easily approximate it with the average adult male's shoe length. Easy to approximate has its uses, but also doesn't necessarily make it the best fit for every application.
Scheduling is a critical component to people needing time, and yes is just about impossible without clocks / calendars / sundials / other "external sources". But that's also where all the interesting stuff happens when people use time and if you can't account for the math of scheduling, people would never use that unit for time.
Part of the problem there is that we do keep trying to "square the circle" if we want to apply metric tendencies to our reference points on rotating spheroids. (Another fun experiment I've seen in sci-fi, and played with myself, is the idea of day time expressed in radians.)
The other thing worth point out is that, though we have centi-, deci-, deca-, and hecto- they get only limited use in practice.
Very few distances are specified in deca- or hectometers.
Very few things are decagrams. There is a metric ounce and pound. But hectogram is not used.
So for distance, we have meter, kilometer. For mass, gram, kilogram, metric tonne.
Within the same system, we could easily deal with kiloseconds and megaseconds.
As far as I know, nobdy uses deciseconds as something other than a weird way of saying 100 milliseconds.
In informal speech, the number of zeros is used as estimate of precision. Using prefixes to specify precision is way too confusing.
Within the metric system, 10 kilosecond would roughly be the same as 3 hours. With a single day, everybody could easily adapt to kiloseconds. The problem starts when you have to create a system of timekeeping based on metric second.