Good morning, Planet!

“good morning, planet”, Govert Schilling ‘tweeted’ on Bluesky. My immediate thought was: Why on earth would an astrophysicist not realise that his greet would not be received in the morning hours for most of the population of this planet? I turned that thought around and started wondering: For how many people would it be morning on any given hour?

This quickly turned out to be too hard a question, given that I would need to take the seasons into account. As seasons change, the line where the sun comes op skews back and forth. So different people would live along those lines. I give that one to Vasilis to work out digitally.

So I simplified the question to: For how many people is it noon? I had an AI calculate the number of people in each geographical 1 hour segment. Timezones would not work here: Those are largely political and the borders are amazingly complex. Even my own timezone is shifted for practical reasons, namely in trade an communications with Berlin.

So I thought about a clock that would be a display of astronomica noon, rather than economical noon. I can not really “see” this in my minds eye, so I decided to generate it in OpenSCAD. I started by making a circular bar graph. Having seen how wild the numbers varied per slice, I decided to compress the length like so: For every doubling of the length, the population is ten fold. To my surprise, when I generated the graph, I noticed that I can sort of see the world map in it.

Standing 4x5 photo of a white wall with a white clock. 24 pie slices do not vary in with, but they do in length. 6.2 mm for the shortest, 104 mm for the longest. The slices are black. It looks a bit like the icon that warns against explosions. Which is maybe fitting for our population. The clock has one hand and it's deep red. It points to what normally the 8 o clock position is, but now it points at the US west coast. — The actual world population clock on the wall. Note that Africa is in the top, and the Pacific on the bottom. Another way of understanding this is graph is imagining you are looking up at earth from the South Pole.

I liked it so much, that I decided to actually make it. So at this point, I had a choice: Either flip the graph and put a ‘standard’ 24 hour clock mechanism in it, or leave the graph as it is, and have the pointer run the other way. I decided to do the second option. So I made a simple gear box for a normal 12 hour clock mechanism, with 12T and 24T gear, that take care of both wishes: Make the pointer rotate once a day, and do so in reverse.

A white gear box, 56mm wide, with only two gears in it: on the top is a 12 teeth white one, and on the bottom a 24 teeth black one. The prototype of the hand is on the big one. It's printed in white. The box is on a loudspeaker with dark veneer, next to it is a corner of a huge nucleus that people in the neotlithicum knock knife blades of off. But that is besides the point here. — The gear box. Simple to think of, but a challenge to 'draw'. I learned a few things.

To keep a sense of scale, I added three concentric lines to the clock face, for 2, 20 and 200 million people per segment. Each are printed with a single line. The slices are thicker. Note that the longest slice is worth about 1.2 Billion people, and the shortest just 100.000. The length of the hand is also part of the grid: The long pointer marks 100 million people, the short counterweight marks 10 million people. The relation between the pointer length and the concentric lines, may give you an idea where the 1B line would be. My printer is too small to include it, plus I like how the huge populations, our timezone included, go off scale.

Eurocentrism, or the urge for a frame of reference made me put Netherlands, Paris, and a part of West Afrika (Nigeria) etc on top. At least we are up here together. The Americas are to the left, Asia to the right, Pacific below. The imbalance between these population sizes is not reflected in our news feed.

A screen shot of the OpenSCAD language. Programming code, in colorful text, to the left, result is an image that can be turned around in 3D on the top right. The clock shape is a deep yellow against a diluted yellow. To the bottom right is a nag screen, where the program put all the erors and warnings. — A screenshot of OpenSCAD. I did not draw this with a mouse or a pen, but in code. Nice and precise, and I do not need to "imagine" first to come up with a result. I generate it, and then I can see if I enjoy it.

So what should Govert Schilling have written?

Granted that “Good morning, people on the planet where this message is likely received in the morning hours and who live far enough from the North Pole to experience a morning anyway, and who happen to check in on me almost in real time.” is a bit long winded for a greeting just to kick the day in a friendly manner and excludes most of the planet for no good reason. Though it might have saved me from the bother of making this graphic tangible. It’s now ticking away on the wall. I guess that is a good thing. So:

Thank you and good moring to you too, Govert Schilling!