Ancient Civilizations Possibly Had Knowledge of a Time When Earth Years Lasted 360 Days

Well, the world's financial systems use a 360 day calendar

However, I suspect that is because it makes calculations easier, rather than accountants having an ancient memory of a faster orbiting earth...

A couple things I have been trying to get better at figurin' since this thread piqued my interest... The basics, some of which have already been mentioned, and which are extremely relevant for the context of the discussion.

1. Days are relative to the planetary body, meaning the amount of 'time'(also distance in space) it takes for light from the sun to reach a specific location on the surface of the earth. This is due to the rotation around the earth's axis.

2. A year is also relative to the planetary body, meaning the amount of time/distance it takes for the planet to come back to its similar orientation around the sun in a helical dynamic. Contrary to the popular wisdom that the body returns to the same position in space, the planet is actually only coming back to a similar orientation. Hard to explain, watch:

This motion gives an apparent movement of the Sun with respect to the stars at a rate of about 1°/day (or a Sun or Moon diameter every 12 hours) eastward, as seen from Earth. On average it takes 24 hours—a solar day—for Earth to complete a full rotation about its axis relative to the Sun so that the Sun returns to the meridian.wiki

3. Orbit radius has no direct corrolation with the amount of days in a year. Right? A bit on Jupiters day:

A day on Jupiter, which is the amount of time it takes to spin around once, is much shorter than a day on Earth. The giant planet's day is only about ten hours long, less than half as long as a Earth day.source

And Mercury:

Mercury has very very long days. How long is one day on Mercury? Each day on Mercury lasts as long as 58 days, 15 hours on Earth. This is quite a feat, considering a whole year on Mercury is only 88 days.source

There are other factors, such as moons and tides.

4. The elliptical orbit is not responsible for seasons. It is the tilt of the axis.

Over the course of an orbit, while the angle of the axial tilt doesn't change, the orientation of a planet's axial tilt moves through 360 degrees (one complete orbit around the Sun), relative to the Sun, causing the seasons.wiki

All for now... hope its all correct.

reply to post by Byrd

Except there's no mechanism that slows a planet down in its orbit. If it goes slower, it starts falling into the sun.

We catch an awful lot of solar wind. It should keep us in orbit. Also, the Moon is spinning away from us, don't you think this would be the same for Earth ? Then there are magnetic fields all around. They can still be responsible for gravity.
Some like to think the plasma theory fits better.

Oh... there was a flood although it was not a global one... probably...

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
Except there's no mechanism that slows a planet down in its orbit. If it goes slower, it starts falling into the sun.

We catch an awful lot of solar wind. It should keep us in orbit.[/quote[

Not really. Solar wind is a flow of ions.

Also, the Moon is spinning away from us, don't you think this would be the same for Earth ?

It is true that the Earth is very gradually moving farther from the sun (curious.astro.cornell.edu... ) but it's much less than an inch a year. You'd have to move a huge number of inches (multiple billions of them) to get any significant change in orbit and make the year longer.

In other words, since the time of the dinosaurs, Earth's orbit has increased by about half the width of Earth's diameter away from the sun (if I didn't goof the math, there, and drop a zero somewhere.)

Then there are magnetic fields all around. They can still be responsible for gravity.

If that was the case, we could just levitate off Earth using a very strong magnet.

Some like to think the plasma theory fits better.

Agreed. Some like to think it fits better. However, the physics of that don't hold up and don't account for things like changes in the length of days and so forth (unlike standard physics.)

Oh... there was a flood although it was not a global one... probably...

Yep. No global flood. Lots of big local ones, though.

reply to post by Byrd


Well thank you for the information, astronomy isn't my forte. Yeah makes perfect sense now. Thanks again for the information. Interesting very.

You can have a look at my current debate thread for some information on this ...

But basically the Maya didn't really invent their calender and they do not have proper leap days etc ... to keep their calendars accurate. The Haab was the only solar calendar they had and it was not even accurate enough to provide seasonal information that was correct over the course of 100 years. (It's impossible to create a calendar with round numbers which is accurate)

I think they did the best with what they could and with their limited life spans found it difficult to make changes to their systems that they had taken from other civilizations.

For this to be convincing to me the Maya would have to be correcting their calendar and surely if they had inherited this information from another race they would be correcting their calendar on a regular basis as per the advanced people they found it from? If anything their random collection of calendars is a collection of different traditions perhaps that they just kept running with.

reply to post by Byrd


Lol

About that solar wind. The Japanese have actually launched a space ship which is solar wind propelled.
I belief it's on its way to Venus as we speak. Theoretically solar wind can propel us to 1/10 of light speed.

I wonder about the forces as in a top, the "Wobble factor". I would assume that would account for some variations in orbits and rotations. I understand there is also a "Wobble factor" to the orbit of our solar system in relation to the galaxy. I have been trying to stress these points to people for over a decade now. There is too much evidence of the "Wobble Factor" in many aspects of our universe.

Originally posted by llama
I wonder about the forces as in a top, the "Wobble factor". I would assume that would account for some variations in orbits and rotations. I understand there is also a "Wobble factor" to the orbit of our solar system in relation to the galaxy. I have been trying to stress these points to people for over a decade now. There is too much evidence of the "Wobble Factor" in many aspects of our universe.

I'll reply to this later (this is kind of a "bump" to remind me) but yes, there are "wobble forces" created by a number of different things. It's not from a single source.