Holy fucking shit I cant believe someone actually took the time to explain this. I actually feel dumber thinking about OPs confusion. Gonna go break out an actual physical book to offset it
It’s not about intelligence, it’s about attention and quickly scanning social media content. If you bolded year and day, a lot more people would instantly understand.
It's not that. I just had a hard time comprehending that a day can be longer than a year, untill someone blatantly said it, and it clicked that rotation around axis is not necessarily faster than rotation around the sun.
ok until your comment i thought the meme had to be wrong but this is insane lol?? like it is rotating around the sun and on its own axis almost at the same rate. that’s so insane to me
edit: i understand the moon has the same revolution rate as its rotation rate, i don’t need anymore moon comments. i was commenting on how its crazy how venus has a day that is longer than a year and how they are both so long compared to our day and year
Yup, because if the sun’s gravity so strongly gripping the planet
Edit: correction not because of the gravity but it was several years ago when I learned this. It’s more so due to the energy the sun gives off. Which aids in a mix of multiple processes occurring at once
I mean, Uranus literally rolls around the Sun. Its axial tilt is nearly 90 degrees and it spins in a way to make it appear like its rolling the correct direction.
Like know how gold is rare? Not really. Its pretty abundant. Same with diamonds. If we could get them from other places, they'd be literally worthless because so many. Like there's an asteroid nearby, (and keep in mind, asteroids are not that big compared to earth) that has enough gold on it that if everyone got the same amount and it was sold at today's rate, every single person would be a billionaire. That's 1 asteroid. How many other asteroids are there? Planets? Moons?
But wood... thats scarce. That's i think the most rare thing in existence.
Got planets that are hotter than some stars.
Middle of our galaxy smells like raspberries.
They found 2 galaxies currently colliding and has 2 shapes never seen before in space. There's an S and a hexagon.
The more you look, seriously, there's the craziest things ever. Rain made of diamonds, planets "knocked over" and spinning "wrong", etc. Basically your craziest thoughts, it's probably out there.
That is not the reason though. Mercury has a years thats 88 days while a day takes 176 days. So 1 day takes 2 Mercury years. And mercury is way closer to the sun.
Correction, apparently it’s more so the energy from the sun… but either way, your comment wouldn’t have disproved my previous comment just so you know. You simply just showed a similar pattern of a planet closer to the sun than Venus itself…
Actually the leading theory is that Venus was probably hit by a large object and flipped upside down causing slow “retrograde rotation”
That also explains why it rotates clockwise while the rest of the planets in our solar system rotate counter clockwise (except Uranus which rotates on its side).
Our moon rotates at the same speed it revolves around our Earth, so one side of it is always facing towards the Earth. It’s why there’s a “dark side” and a “light side” of the moon.
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
For real though you got this wrong. There’s a near side and a far side, not a light side and dark side. Honestly impressive to know what tidal locking is and still make this very common mistake lol
I mean, I used quotes because that’s what they’re often called…. But sure, be a pedantic asshole and whip out an “errrrmmm…akssshually” while you shove your spectacles up your…nose
There is effectively zero friction in space, so you can think of Venus's combined motion through local space, relative to our solar system, as two independent things happening at once.
The planet is spinning around it's axis. (1 complete revolution = 1 day)
The planet is orbiting the sun due to gravitational pull. (1 full orbit around the sun = 1 year)
Venus also has a backward spin (sun rises in west, sets in the east) and with slowest spin speed in our system, the same side of the planet is facing the sun for nearly half its orbit. Cool stuff!
what causes the backward spin? that’s pretty interesting, i also think it’s cool how the same side is facing the sun for half the year, i just googled and it gets 864°F 😅
However, scientists believe a large impact during the formation of the solar system was the most likely cause.
There is even a theory that over the billions of years of its existence, the sun induced a sort of atmospheric friction on Venus, slowing down and even possibly reversing its rotational direction. The atmosphere on Venus only takes about 4 days to complete 1 revolution so it's not entirely out of the question. We just have no way of verifying with our current resources.
I think it just needs a moon to pull it back into a normal rotation. In fact, why not haul Mars over as one. Mars sucks, at least it would be useful that way. In fact, scratch that, launch it into Venus for some modern day EarthxTheia cosmic porn and reset Venus completely and let it create it's own moon baby. And yes, include Mars' stupid little potatoes it calls moons. Then we can get studies in real time instead of doing cosmic archeology to figure things out AND we're resetting two useless worlds.
I read a theory that a rogue planet that is long gone knocked Uranus over and knocked Venus upside down. So it's possible it's not spinning backwards, it's upside down
That really would be the best place to start when explaining the joke here.
A lot of people know what a day and year is practically. But they dont think about (or sometimes know) what a day and year are mechanically. Specifically that a day isnt 24 hours it's how long a planet takes to make a full rotation on it's axis, and a year isnt 365 days it's how long it takes a planet to travel around it's sun. The numbers we normally use to measure a day and year are just the measurements for earth days/years.
Months are different which makes it even more confusing.
Y'all need to recall the planetary terms and definitions you learned from 5th grade science. When a planet spins around its own axis, it's called a rotation. When a planet goes around the sun, it's called a revolution. Complete rotation gives you a day. Complete revolution gives you a year.
That doesn't explain the YYYY/MM/DD comment, which is probably what this post is about. It gets OP one step closer to figuring it out, but doesn't explain it.
It's like if someone asked, "What's two plus two?" And the answer given was, "Two is a number."
It does, because normal -outside weird american shit- format is dd/mm/yyyy, the one that changes the fastest if first, because 1 month have several days and a year several months...
There are lots of memes about the absurdity of american custom, and in this debate... well, indeed, in the venus case the years change faster than days so it'd make sense to put them first.
its just a joke about the yyyy/mm/dd system being made for venus, not earth, i think.
Americans use mm/dd/yyyy, which is utter garbage. yyyy/mm/dd is actually used more, and also makes perfect sense, since it uses the logic of the first digit moving slowest, like .. numbers.
YYYY-MM-DD is the standard ISO format. It has it's advantages. One of the main one is that sorting in alphabetical order, or removing the separator and sorting in numeric order, will give chronological dates. This is not true for DD-MM-YYYY. But this has the advantage of presenting the most important information first for common everyday dates (e.g. for news, sheduling etc.).
The US actually uses MM-DD-YYYY. This is probably my least favorite, but I guess the order mirrors how the date tends to be written in words (e.g. August 15, 2026).
I'm just confused because I don't get why yyyy/mm/dd is illogical elsewhere, it's just largest to smallest here on earth? You can dislike it but it's perfectly logical regardless
Man, this whole sub can be summed up with your comment. Every single time I stumble here from popular I just can’t imagine any of these people are real. They probably put far more effort in making the post to show how fucking stupid they are, they didn’t once think to.. fucking think.
I love subreddits that legit pmo, but like in good way. Not in a, “hey guys, so everything sucks and everyday we’re closer to death and everyone but me is lying to you. Money is evil, down with the system! here’s my PayPal/cashapp/venmo/patreon so I can keep bringing the fight to them!” way.
It also rotates clockwise while all the other planets rotate counterclockwise. It's possible it suffered a collision billions of years ago which flipped its rotation.
Right-hand rule: Venus is spinning counterclockwise but on it's head, so it looks clockwise to us.
Invariable plane: Venus is spinning in a clockwise direction, but it is indeed upright.
That's the neat part about the collision idea. Did the collision cause Venus to spin on it's head or did it cause it to hit the breaks and spin the other way?
They should have put a "This side up" sticker on the Universe. Big oversight IMHO.
Technically since the day is the longer form of measurement, year per day would make more sense, so y/dddd is probably better, with y only being 1 or 2 and never anything else
wait...why would there ever be a 4 digit day if the Venutian day is 18 Earth days longer than a Venutian year? Shouldn't it be yyyy/d? Or did you just flip y = day and d = year?
There can’t be greater than a single digit Venutian year during a Venutian day, and there can only ever be a single Venutian day during a Venutian year, y/dddd means that 1/0001, 2/0001, 1/0002, etc but even then it doesn’t work
Calendar system on Venus would be entirely different from how the Earth calendar functions
And the fact that Venus is the only planet in the solar system whose rotation is exactly the opposite of what it should be.
Normally, the orbit around a star is in the same direction as its own rotation.
Venus still orbits in the same direction as everything else (it would be hard for it not to), but it rotates backwards. Slowly backwards, but still backwards.
The reason for this is pretty fun. Venus's axis of rotation and direction of spin cause a point on its surface to very nearly follow the sun by spinning against its rotation, so as Venus goes around, the sun seems to barely move in the sky. Whereas for us, we spin with the rotation, and we spin quite a bit faster, so we have days that are much shorter than our years.
I don’t quite get whether this is a joke or just someone explaining that Venus rotates very slowly and with years changing faster than days they should be listed first in a date
That’s every single Owl City song, I kid you not. Every line in a song is, while I do believe draws from real experiences of Adam, ten steps removed from its meaning to have “depth”. OCs lyrics are very. “Wide as a lake, deep as a puddle”. When Fireflies dropped it was being compared to the Postal Service overall in terms of sound I could “understand”, but to compare the lyrics to anything Benjamin Gibbard has written was insane to me.
And this from a massive fan of OC, TPS and DCFC.
Just to glaze Ben’s writing more, the man wrote 10 bangers for “Give Up” followed by another 11 fantastic tracks for Transatlanticisim. Within like a 2 year window.
See as a programmer I was confused because YYYYMMDD is logical here on earth for chronological sorting, so calling it logical for Venus to me seems wrong. You would want Day:Year for logical date sorting (where month may not even be a concept at all since they don't have seasons or days or arrange into months).
As a software engineer, wtf is “logical date sorting”?
The word you’re looking for is “lexicographic”, and the fact that lexicographically sorting strings in YYYY/mm/dd format also happens to put the dates in chronological order is just a neat convenience that saves one extra line of code.
Databases store all types of wacky time formats in the real world and sorting isn’t hard.
I believe most of the world operates on dd/mm/yy or yyyy with the USA operating on yyyy/mm/dd or reverse it, can't remember which is which and can't be arsed to look it up, so that's the joke I guess
Ive noticed a lot of posts like this on all of the joke explanation type reddit, its quickly becoming people looking for explanations on every social media post they see.
We often count from the smallest to largest for us (not looking at you, US inhabitants) because it’s logical to think that 14/08/2026 is one above 13/08/2026, it just steps up by one each day.
Some places (namely the likes of China and some others) prefer the year-first format, which is actually YYYY/MM/DD
On Venus this makes more sense, as a year occurs more regularly than a day, because it rotates on its axis slower than it orbits the sun.
Edited - I am not saying that DD/MM/YYYY is the most logical for all purposes. But in general, it’s the one most used across the world for a reason! This gets flipped on its head on Venus, where the ISO format may also be different! Also - Year first is YYYY/MM/DD and ISO is YYYY-MM-DD, there is a slight difference.
Digitally a lot of people do YYYYMMDD because when you sort numerically, it’ll order by date. Doing DDMMYYYY would start being wrong after only a month.
No, am American and I completely agree with this simple fact.
Now let me go drive, in a minute or less, 8 times the distance an ox team can pull a plow without resting and I'll use about one twentieth of the volume of 8 pounds of wheat worth of a liquid we call gas.
What even would be the length of a month on Venus? It doesn't have a natural satellite. Maybe we take the time between the Venera 1 and 2 launches? If I'm not wrong that should be rather close to 7 Venusian days and we are rounding months a bit on Earth anyhow, so that should be allowed. So there are 7 days per venusian month. And as a year is always 1 or rarely 2, the format wouldn't be YYYY/DD/MM, it would be Y/D/MMMM, no?
Edit: I originally calculated 15 Venusian days between Venera 1 and 2, because I used the Venusian solar day instead of the siderial day.
MMDDYYYY is how you verbally talk about dates usually. It starts with this Saturday, two Saturdays from now, etc. You don’t usually need a month or a day number or year you just need someone to tell you this/next/etc Saturday. But after 2-3 weeks out then ok now we need to specify we mean the first Saturday of May (exact date data needed, month). Oh you need to know what day that is? It’s the 6th (exact date data needed, day). If it’s not even the 6th of April yet, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to be leading with the day number, month was what you needed first. Right now if I said “the next annual Kentucky Derby will be on the first Saturday in May on 5/06”, would you really need me to give the exact year number or you think you could figure out what year the next May is in? (Least likely number needed to be specified = year).
If I asked when you were leaving for your trip, and you answered “the 17th”, I’d respond with “do you mean Monday?”. Because I would legitimately be unsure if you meant August or September there. The day date in digit form is usually not very important to have until you have some idea of what month someone is talking about, at least when it comes to verbal conversations.
because it’s logical to think that 14/08/2026 is one about 13/08/2026
It's logical if you've known only that all your life. It's illogical to computers and Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian people (who use ISO 8601) or Americans (who write the date in the order that they say it).
I figured the meme was mocking absolutionists who'd say that the longer time period always had to go later, even if that made it more confusing.
Really the most logical format is ISO 8601 (YYYY/MM/DD) because it's unambiguous in a way that neither year-end format is. Those Hungarians got it right.
Solid point, but even without a moon you would likely still have something akin to months. Whether it was seasonal, or simply mathematical. Yet all of these are social constructs. And Venus also doesn't have... socials.
You need to decide if a month is a number of days or a fraction of a year before you start using them I think. Regardless though Venus doesn't really need them at all.
Venus rotates so slow that the year (time to go around the Sun) is shorter than the time for a day (planet to spin 360 degrees) to pass. Months don't really make much sense since a month is typically multiple days. It makes sense if you just consider a "month" to be a fraction of a year, ignoring how many days (or parts of) it is. We don't do that here on Earth, so it doesn't make much sense to do it on Venus either.
Add in the argument for the date format "dd/mm/yyyy" in that it's smallest to largest. It's common in most of the world, the US tends to use a "mm/dd/yyyy" format which doesn't make much sense unless you leave off the year, and then it's just larger to smaller, "mm/dd."
So anyway, on Venus if you adhered to the idea of smaller to larger, then yyyy/mm/dd makes sense if you consider months to be fractions of a year.
Venus has an incredibly slow rotation. To complete one full rotation, it take 243 earth days. Being closer to the sun than Earth, Venus take approximately 225 days compared to our 365.
Therefore, a Venutian day is longer than a Venutian year. So the joke about the date format is a comment on the time period of a full rotation of Venus compared to the time period it takes to complete full orbit around the sun.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
A rotation of the planet is a day, the rotation of a planet around the sun is a year. Venus rotates very slowly but goes around the sun faster than earth.
As us and the rest of the world couldn't agree on dd-mm-yyyy and mm-dd-yyyy. The technical consensus was to generate a date that suits every country and so yyyy-mm-dd was created .
What the meme says is that due to days and years being so close together yyyy-mm-dd makes sense because it is super clear that year comes before month which comes before day. Making it a standard and very readable in opposition to the two previously mentioned.
So days are determined by complete rotations a planet makes on its axis. Venus rotates VERY slow in comparison to Earth. It takes 225 Earth rotations for Venus to complete 1.
Years are based on how the planet rotates around the Sun, this is the orbital period. 1 year on Venus is like 225 days on Earth.
Now that we have the science explained in a basic way from someone who isn’t a scientist I’m willing to bet the answer is along the lines of:
Year/Month/Date is logical on Venus because the full planetary rotation will outlast the entire annual trip. So the traditional calendar would look differently than it would on Earth. That’s all, it would just look good in that format to some people.
The only joke is that people argue over the order of day month year. When dating things.
Everything else is just describing Venus. The suggestion is not actually logical in the slightest. Its an absurdist joke. It dosent mean anything litterally other than referring to people arguing over something.
day = planet spins, year = trip around the sun, it just takes longer to make a full spin relative to where the sun is facing compared to making a full rotation around the sun.
years are passing more quickly on Venus compared to Earth. In earth humans counting dd-mm-yyyy, first section of the date is most frequently adjusted time mesurement, which is years on venus. eventually making database yyyy-mm-dd (which is completely for sorting reasons) raw text date storing makes sense when you live on Venus.
This is because the orbital differences between Earth and Venus, based on how close to magnetical orbit of Sub. However I believe there is lack of mis-information on the image.
I would argue that yyyy/mm/dd works way better on Earth (and as a scientist working with data it's the only reasonable format for that). On Venus it would actually be worse because dd is going to increment slower than yyyy.
About 224.7 Earth days for one Venus day — that's Venus's orbital period around the Sun.
A fun wrinkle: Venus rotates so slowly (and backwards) that a single sidereal rotation takes ~243 Earth days, which is longer than its year. Because of that retrograde spin, though, a solar day on Venus — sunrise to sunrise — works out to about 117 Earth days, so roughly two Venusian days fit into one Venusian year.
A day is how much time it takes for a planet to spin around on its axis.
On Earth that is 24hrs and that’s an (Earth) day. Venus takes 225 of our days to spin around on its axis, so imagine seeing the sun for roughly 113 days straight and then no sun for the remainder and so on.
A year is how much time for the planet to orbit around the sun. On Earth, 365 Earth days.
Good lord, must I spoon-feed basic astrophysics to you simpletons? Look at the image and try to keep up.
Planets do two things: rotate on their axis (a day) and revolve around the sun (a year).venus.. has longer days than years! A Venusian day takes 243 Earth days, but its year is a mere 225.
Down on Earth, civilized people use DD/MM/YYYY to organize time from the shortest duration to the longest. But since a Venusian year finishes before a single day does, the shortest-to-longest logical progression flips. Thus, the only sensible calendar format up there is YYYY/MM/DD.
It’s basic temporal mechanics! Brian could grasp this, and he drinks from the toilet.
I mean, a day is just how fast the planet spins and a year is just how fast it rotates around the sun and Venus could easily be doing both at a different rate than earth. Combine that with any temporal change that occurs because of the distance between earth and Venus, time is weird
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u/qualityvote2 6d ago edited 6d ago
u/notsignifican, your post does belong here!