Galactic Standard Units

Although the Blue Planet's hegemony over human-occupied space began to splinter with the Great Exodus, even to the present day, its influence is still felt far beyond its official borders. One example is that although other standard units have come and gone, most notably the systems developed by the Church of the Chosen after settling on Zion, the commonly used Standard Units of the Known Sphere have a decidedly Terran flavor.

Interstellar Distance

Interstellar distances are measured in light years (LYs), the distance traveled by light in one year. Although different planets' years have different durations, the galactic LY uses one Terran Julian year as the baseline. Therefore, an Earth-based light year is 9.461x10¹⁵ meters.

After the discovery of FTL travel, a great debate ensured whether to use a LY or a parsec (short for a "parallax of one arcsecond," which is 3.086×10¹⁶ meters or 3.262 light years) as the standard unit to measure distances between stars. Ultimately, the Terran Commission decided that the LY was more intuitive and easily scalable and chose it as the standard unit for interstellar travel.

Time

Any planet that is at least marginally a member of the interstellar community will keep track of at least two times: local standard time, and Terran Standard Time (TST, also known as Greenwich Mean Time). The latter is commonly used in interstellar commerce and communication. Thus, for example, someone who travels to the local spaceport to wait for a visiting relative would see the flight information (departure time, arrival time) quoted in TST.

Money

The most widely used and accepted currency in the galaxy is the Megacorporation Credit ("M-Cred"). While the superpowers and smaller governments have their own currencies, after various financial and monetary disasters, the M-Cred has supplanted these national currencies, because it is widely considered to be more stable and trustworthy. The Megacorporation Credit uses a floating peg, indexed to a basket of the ten largest national currencies and stable commodities.

The M-Cred began as an informal credit used by the Megacorps for transactions between themselves. Later, the money mills started using M-Creds on the frontier with worlds that they constantly dealt with.

Unsurprisingly, M-Creds are used primarily where the Megacorps have a presence. In most of Wild Space, where banking infrastructure is poor or does not exist, people often prefer to use a barter economy based on gold or other stable commodities instead of suspect local currencies.

Excerpted from: Dr. Becky Banzai, The Known Sphere: A Traveller's Guide, Kyodai Ryu Publishing, 2150