There should be an Olympic event to test human's ability to measure time intervals.
Each contestant receives a stopwatch. Tests are conducted in various environments, with different levels of information / actions available to competitors.
Environments
- empty white room, just a chair.
- empty white room, with a chair, pencil, paper.
- outside, while walking. They'd have to walk at least a mile in 15 minutes - nothing to stress them out, but something they have to do to break concentration
- outside, while doing exercise. If the exercise really sped up their heart, it would cause additional difficulty by messing with their perceptions of time. I imagine they'd have to do a lot of psyching themselves up before they started, to get their heart rate to something constant.
- blindfolded
Click it after an interval
In these events they just have to click the timer to start, and then click it again later to end.
Intervals:
- 1 minute
- 10 minutes
- 1 hour
- 1 day
- 1 week
- 1 year
- 1000 years (civilizational...)
Results
Whoever clicked the timer closest to the right time would win. There would be no special penalty for going over or under.
Strategies
I would love to see what strategies participants invented for themselves.
Perhaps reciting a memorized speech? Or physical, repetitive motions - drumming a certain number of times on the table. Or writing out a memorized speech. Some might use their own heartbeat, or rate of breathing.
It would be very interesting also to compare the different strategies. Which types of activities let us measure time best while we're doing them?
Some contestants might try to use physical constants like gravity to help - calibrate their clocks based on how quickly a bouncing ball stops.
Caveats
We shouldn't let people bring in clocks, but if they wanted to build one in the longer events, I guess they could. For this there would be another event - played in wilderness, over a time span of 10 years, in an area where there are no seasons?
Final Version
In extremely long variants, the main problem is preserving the knowledge that a game is being played at all. If the task is to click a timer after 1000 years, how would you design a civilization to even have people who remember that winning this event is their goal?