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How could SI units be derived from scratch without the use of modern technology? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/askscience

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Think "you wake up in the woods naked," Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?

My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit's dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.

I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.

That's as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.

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[–] Brokkr 3 points 1 year ago

Sure, in that scenario, such a system would be possible. Hopefully, there is still an earth to communicate with however. So we'd have to keep using earth days and years to enable effective communication. Also, the entire ship would have been built using earth based units, so it might be easier to use the system we've already got.