EVE Fiction

Seeing how people in EVE universe lived for thousands of years on planets with varying lengths of day and night and orbital periods - would they have developed different kinds of sleep cycles, where some people can get by with just few hours of sleep or where some people stay awake for days but also sleep for a whole day, or any variant you can think of? Or is fifteenish thousand years too short of a time to adjust such biological basics?

They could just arbitrarily pick a sleep schedule if it was too difficult to adapt. I was stationed on submarines for a while and we changed our day cycle to an 18 hour day split into 3 sections. Sleep/on watch/off-watch. Especially in a space faring society its possible they just dont use the sun as a sleep cycle keeper unless its convenient.

It's possible that they simulated the sun cycle in places that see near-permanent human residency. Wouldn't be surprising considering the tech we see them having.

What a great question and thing to ponder about Teinyhr.

A long time ago I was a volunteer in a village on an island in Micronesia. The work day for the males was based on tides. Low tide was no good, your boat or raft would be sitting on a mudflat, and many meters away from the waterline. Also, fish weren't very active during low tide. Wave action wasn't stirring things up and moving food around.

So, the work day was based more on tides (lunar cycles) than on sunlight (cyclidian cycles). Guys could shift their sleep schedules to match when they needed to work, and when they should sleeping to get ready for a long day or long night of work. No problem sleeping all day or all night for them, really. Matching that was tough for me, because I taught in the village school, and followed a clock/circadian sleep cycle. My schedule was determined by a clock. Theirs were determined by lunar cycles. They seems to do OK at it.

And not too long ago, some researchers found a study about peasant farmers in France around 1700. The scientist recording about them back said that their work and sleep patterns depended on the season.
-During the spring planting season, they worked hard, and went home and went to bed early.
-During the summer growing season, they worked less and just tended crops, and spent more time going to festivals, church, etc. during the longer daylight hours.
-In the fall, they worked like hell, many hours per day, to bring in every scrap of the harvest and get it preserved for later eating.
-During the long, cold, dark winters, they kind of hibernated in their cottages. That was partly to preserve food and heating fuel. Less activity, less calories burned, less heating of open spaces needed. They'd just wake up at some traditional times, have meals together, stir around and gather stored food and fuel, go to church on Sunday and greet neighbors, etc. But most of the day and night was spent sleeping.

So, from those two, I'd speculate that humans in New Eden would be able to adapt their sleep patterns to match the patterns of the planets they live on and grew up on. And that the local societies would have traditions and lifestyles evolved to match the local sun cycle and local moon/moons cycles. What might be difficult could be having to adapt to working on an 'external clock' schedule. For example, a universal CONCORD clock, or the sleep cycles external visitors/administrators/business people run on and expect. And considering New Eden people and the emphasis on commerce and being brutally self-serving, that might happen quite a bit. A lot of room for speculating about a world as a setting for a story, I'd think.