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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7817579" data-attributes="member: 4937">Interesting question.Speaking as someone that has been underground a lot, they probably have very vague notions of the passage of time. There has been studies done and peoples clocks stop syncing up with the 24 hour day after a relatively short time underground. Seasons are only detectable underground within a very short distance of the entrance. Deeper in a cave you have year round constant temperature, so seasons wouldn't be really a thing.With no changes in the environment occuring on a regular cycle, I think it likely that there won't be much interest per se in tracking the passage of time. You don't have crops dependent on weather cycles. You don't have day and night cycles. You don't have phases of the moon or things like that. Any relative constants you might have are totally biological in nature - the length of a normal sleep. So you have a watch or a rest, and most people can potentially be awake for two watches or rests without needing a rest. But there will be no 'third watch' or 'first watch'. It's all just an unbroken chain of watches. You have other biological markers like the length of a pregnancy, or the length of time before an infant obtains maturity. But absent these markers, people would have only a rough sense of the passage of time, or how to count them. A human might say that a pregnancy lasts about 800 watches, depending on whether three watches actually add up to 24 hours (which they probably don't, they usually go a bit longer than that).But overall I have the distinct impression that they won't care about seconds, minutes, hours, days, or what not.&nbsp; It will just be the endless dark.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7817579, member: 4937"] Interesting question. Speaking as someone that has been underground a lot, they probably have very vague notions of the passage of time. There has been studies done and peoples clocks stop syncing up with the 24 hour day after a relatively short time underground. Seasons are only detectable underground within a very short distance of the entrance. Deeper in a cave you have year round constant temperature, so seasons wouldn't be really a thing. With no changes in the environment occuring on a regular cycle, I think it likely that there won't be much interest per se in tracking the passage of time. You don't have crops dependent on weather cycles. You don't have day and night cycles. You don't have phases of the moon or things like that. Any relative constants you might have are totally biological in nature - the length of a normal sleep. So you have a watch or a rest, and most people can potentially be awake for two watches or rests without needing a rest. But there will be no 'third watch' or 'first watch'. It's all just an unbroken chain of watches. You have other biological markers like the length of a pregnancy, or the length of time before an infant obtains maturity. But absent these markers, people would have only a rough sense of the passage of time, or how to count them. A human might say that a pregnancy lasts about 800 watches, depending on whether three watches actually add up to 24 hours (which they probably don't, they usually go a bit longer than that). But overall I have the distinct impression that they won't care about seconds, minutes, hours, days, or what not. It will just be the endless dark. [/QUOTE]

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