[HN Gopher] Europe pushing for lunar time zone
___________________________________________________________________
Europe pushing for lunar time zone
Author : geox
Score : 250 points
Date : 2023-03-01 13:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| retube wrote:
| "Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56
| microseconds each day"
|
| Is this a relativity effect from lower gravity?
| mkl wrote:
| Yes. Search for "relativ" in this thread for more details.
| [deleted]
| reportgunner wrote:
| I don't get it, why don't we just use UTC ?
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| There's a whole lot of social conventions tied to local time,
| sunrise/sundown, and the circadian rythm in general.
|
| Sure, it'd be possible but we'd have to concieve a lot of new
| cultural concepts to replace the ones invalidated by the shift
| to UTC, and find new ways to remind people that it's impolite
| to call people in the middle of the night.
|
| In the long run, a list of time zones aren't that much more
| complicated to work with than a list of times when it's mid-day
| is in the major population centres on the planet.
| noworld wrote:
| I don't think they meant replace all time zones with UTC, but
| just put the Moon on UTC.
| reportgunner wrote:
| Yeah, my point being that 1 minute passing is 60 seconds
| both on Earth and the moon. We have a Lunar calendar and
| the moon is tidally locked to Earth so it seems trivial to
| convert Earth time to Moon time. The terms "Earth time" and
| "Moon time" seem weird to me in themselves, in my view it's
| "Human time".
|
| I understand having a separate time for Mars or other
| planets as they have their own cycles.
| msm_ wrote:
| > The terms "Earth time" and "Moon time" seem weird to me
| in themselves, in my view it's "Human time".
|
| - It's also weird the time on the moon would have to
| account for variations in earth rotatoin speed (as UTC
| does) - Time on the moon actually goes slower due to
| relativistic effect - the effect is small (in tens of
| microseconds per day) but measurable.
| golemotron wrote:
| I'm not sure the rest of the world should look on complacently
| while Europe attempts to colonize the moon. This should be
| something for Lunarians to decide.
| rascul wrote:
| I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight
| savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.
| billpg wrote:
| If we're going to have major time reform, can we start the
| daily cycle at dawn?
|
| 1am on Tuesday is known as "Monday Night".
| riffraff wrote:
| > got rid of 12 hour clocks.
|
| We got rid of 6-hours clocks and it only took a few centuries,
| there's hope!
| poulpy123 wrote:
| No time zone would make everything extremely complicated for
| everyone
| Archelaos wrote:
| Just use Julian dates. This way you can also get rid of years,
| months, weeks, ... You only need to change the Julian period
| every now and then, ie. every 7980 years. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day
| Taywee wrote:
| With timezones:
|
| * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her?
| I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of
| me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up
| between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight,
| and she's an early bird, so she should be awake.
|
| * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they
| are in a different time zone, did they mean mine or theirs?
|
| Without timezones:
|
| * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here
| as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the
| way way around the world. I have to look up their typical
| waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side
| of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much
| does that change over the seasons?
|
| * They said the meeting was at 18:00. I know exactly when that
| is.
|
| * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the
| middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on
| Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning
| of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when
| morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the
| beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
|
| I agree with DST and 12-hour clocks, those are antiquated and
| mostly pointless. If you get rid of time zones, you don't
| simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for
| another. The complication is that you are interacting with
| humans that have different hours than you do, getting more
| different as you get farther away. Without time zones, you
| still have those complications, and you trade the set of time
| zone complications for another set of complications, by having
| your time completely divorced from your local daylight and
| working hours.
|
| There are stupidities with modern time zones, but the concept
| exists for a good reason.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Wow, there's clearly pros and cons for both! It's all about
| compromise and the way it currently works, works for the
| majority of people that don't even experience the downsides
| in their day to day life.
|
| Like having to coordinate meetings around the world or
| figuring out what time it is for their friend on the other
| side of the world. Most people never deal with any of that.
| They just want it to be 12:00 and bright out when they eat
| lunch (or whenever they eat lunch).
| once_inc wrote:
| I've literally heard nobody say they want it to be 12.00
| and bright out when they eat lunch, only that they want it
| to be bright out.
|
| Suppose we set the universal time to the current -12h
| meridian. Everyone works with that exact same time. If I
| receive a scheduled meeting at 15.00 I know exactly when to
| be there (wow, that's late for me!). If glance at the clock
| and see that it is 4.00, I know it's time for my afternoon
| tea, and that the sun is still out.
|
| I think people would get used to this line of thinking very
| rapidly, and would scheduling would be arguably made
| easier, because the proposed time would not need to be
| parsed by anyone.
| Zr40 wrote:
| > With timezones:
|
| > * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for
| her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours
| ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically
| wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM
| and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be
| awake.
|
| > Without timezones:
|
| > * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time
| here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of
| the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical
| waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early
| side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How
| much does that change over the seasons?
|
| This is actually the same thing. In both cases you have to
| know or look up that there's an 8 hour difference between the
| two of you.
|
| The bits about the seasons and being an early bird apply
| equally to both cases, so it's not really relevant to the
| comparison.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not the same thing. I do not need to reason at all
| right now, I just look at the clock that shows times in
| relevant timezones. I know all the information instantly,
| without any calculations in head at all.
|
| In the latter case, you do need to do math, because what
| you are getting is meaningless number and then you need to
| convert it to some kind of "how long after typical start of
| day" format to get information you actually want.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Ah, so you're saying you have a clock showing German
| time, and it did the "math" for you.
|
| Imagine multiple world clocks, in the typical Hollywood
| command bunker look. Instead of each clock having hour
| hands pointing in different directions, they'd all have
| the same hour hand position, but different highlighted
| zones for waking hours (or "shift 1", "shift 2", "shift
| 3", for 24h duty).
| rascul wrote:
| > * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in
| the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on
| Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the
| beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean
| when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the
| beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
|
| The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones
| don't help or hurt that. It's already not clear if "Tuesday
| morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours. Maybe they could
| say "Tuesday around 1400" and we would both know when that
| was without considering the offset.
|
| > If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything.
| You trade one set of complications for another.
|
| You do make a lot of things simpler by not having to figure
| out offsets. Sometimes you still will, but it will be less
| often.
| xarope wrote:
| In the military, there is Zulu (+0 UTC/GMT) and Juliet time
| ("my" time). Every report with times should always indicate
| the timezone (whether Z or J or otherwise), e.g. in NYC 2pm
| would be 1400Y. Any recent/current military folks want to
| comment?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Is there a different single letter per time zone band?
| That's almost elegant if so (as long as you ignore the
| many places with idiosyncratic time zones).
| kubanczyk wrote:
| I didn't know what a time zone band was, but I was able
| to find out:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Zone_(band)
|
| But seriously, in DST world, the numerical offsets (-6,
| ...) are confusing enough, adding yet another "simpler"
| notation would only increase confusion.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Unfortunately, there's too many timezones for just A-Z,
| but nautical time does make an attempt. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets for the
| funny markings they decided to use when they ran out of
| letters.
| bonzini wrote:
| More often than not, one's morning or afternoon is late in
| the evening or in the middle of the night for the other
| person. So morning is almost unambiguously referring to the
| westernmost person and afternoon to the easternmost.
|
| Instead if the working day begins at 23:00 (as would be the
| case for Pacific time) for me and 8:00 for you, but the
| meeting is already at 1:00/10:00, it is unclear if you mean
| "at 1:00 of Wednesday, which is on the working day that
| started Tuesday at 23:00" or "at 1:00 of Tuesday, on the
| working day that started Monday at 23:00".
| kuboble wrote:
| > It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my
| Tuesday morning or yours
|
| In 99% of cases of my communications it's perfectly clear
| because it's the same for both of us. The GP said that
| without a local timezone Tuesday Morning would be ambiguous
| even in a local context.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| As someone frequently half a world off from those I'm
| scheduling a call with, it helps to adapt a format that
| explicitly states [calendar date] [24hr time] my time /
| [calendar date] [24hr time] your time.
| friendzis wrote:
| The takeaway is that we, humans, tend to reference things in
| non-universal frames of reference. Be it "morning" for time
| or "office" for location. Timezones can be seen as an
| emergent property of long-distance communication. Whatever
| the algorithm you choose the underlying problem with
| "inertial" frames of reference remains.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| It's actually an emergent property of trains needing to be
| predictable and run on time. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
| aflag wrote:
| "* I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time
| here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of
| the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical
| waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early
| side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How
| much does that change over the seasons?"
|
| In both cases you need to do some maths. You know early birds
| wake up at 11 where you live. If you know she's 8h ahead,
| just add 8. So, 19 is when you should call.
|
| For calling people nothing really change. Adapting when
| moving somewhere else is the tricky bit. If I move to another
| city or country I just adjust my clock and automatically know
| when things will be open, working hours, etc. Otherwise,
| whenever you move you have to keep mentally reminding
| yourself that the work day starts at 12 here, not 7 like I'm
| used to and so on.
| detrites wrote:
| This is obviously a software problem that could be solved
| universally at the OS level.
|
| We have all kinds of low-level protocols for coordinating all
| manner of things. Distilling a coherent system of agreeing on
| a timezone difference, between two communicating entities and
| presenting that to the user at any time would be quite basic.
|
| We have location data for all, at all times. We have a local,
| accurate clock. There's little else we'd need. What remaining
| issues are all UX. Apple could roll such a thing out parallel
| on all their multitude devices and it'd be basically trivial.
|
| Is it maybe just habit that we gravitate to a manual process,
| when an automated one would be rather easy in this situation?
|
| On iOS, the existing clock app already provides a basic form,
| tapping the plus button allows the addition of multiple zones
| and provides useful additional context in the form of offsets
| and what day it is relative to the users local date and time.
|
| That's halfway there, it would only need contact awareness to
| be able to provide a solution.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| Apple already do have support for specifying the time zone
| in appointment times, and the Clock application can show
| the current time in different places. What woudl you want
| to add to this?
| detrites wrote:
| Attach the current, local time to all contacts, at the
| basic, fundamental level. If contacts are in a different
| zone, every app accesses an OS-defined UX, that displays
| a contacts local time in a ubiquitous, familiar fashion
| all users get used to.
| bb123 wrote:
| Why do we need to make it a software problem? The existing
| system makes it a trivial mental calculation.
| detrites wrote:
| The amount of people complaining here about how difficult
| it is to keep a handle on illustrates it's not a trivial
| mental calculation, even for HN. I would agree,
| especially when coordinating multiple, distant parties.
| sunaurus wrote:
| > With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What
| time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so
| she's 8 hours ahead of me
|
| > Without timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany.
| It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but
| she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to
| look up their typical waking hours. ... What time does the
| sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?
|
| You aren't doing a fair comparison. In your "with timezones"
| example, you are considering it trivial to look up/remember
| what timezone Germany is in, but in your "without timezones"
| example, you are making it out to be more difficult to look
| up/remember what the "day-hours" of Germany would be.
|
| In a world without timezones, you could just Google "what are
| they day hours in Germany" just like you can Google "what is
| the timezone in Germany" now. And in fact, it would be much
| easier to reason about - if you know that the time is
| currently 10:00, and the day starts at 18:00 in Germany, then
| you don't need to do any more math, you can just wait until
| it's after 18:00 to call her.
|
| > If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the
| middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on
| Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the
| beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean
| when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the
| beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
|
| Again, you're assuming that language would not be different
| in a world without timezones. It's a completely unrealistic
| scenario, language always evolves to fit our real needs.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, I hate timezones with a passion but the more I think
| about them, the more I recognize they're the least bad option
| available. They correctly optimize for making most common
| cases trivial, while rare cases relatively easy.
|
| I think it needs to be said here: cross-timezone scheduling
| and datetime math are _extremely rare_ relative to people 's
| daily experience. It may not be obvious to us here, because
| we're much more likely to be dealing with the unusual case -
| building distributed systems, having international
| users/customers, working for multinational companies or
| cooperating with companies from other countries, etc. Almost
| nobody ever does that, and it makes no sense to make everyone
| do extra mental arithmetic when thinking or talking about
| other places, just for the sake of a minority of white-collar
| workers who can't be arsed to add a second column to their
| Outlook calendar, or double-check when they have a Zoom
| meeting.
|
| Getting rid of timezones would make most of everyday matters
| location-dependent. Timezones allow us to use the same
| numbering of times of day regardless of where any of us
| lives. 08:00 is morning. 22:00 is night. 12:00-14:00 is
| around when people have lunch. Etc. We can talk about our
| days in all kinds of ways (movies, plays, songs, novels,
| guides, etc.), retaining a precise numerical scale (vs. much
| less useful terms like "morning" or "afternoon"), and
| everyone everywhere can relate. Getting rid of the timezones
| makes this impossible.
|
| Note the difference between _talking about_ daily experience
| with people around the world, vs. _doing things in sync_ with
| people around the world. Timezones make the former trivial,
| and the latter easy. Removing timezones makes the latter
| trivial, but the former _hard_. Hard enough that people would
| quickly recreate timezones for convenience.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The worst problem with timezones IMO is that they are way
| too big [1], compared to what they should be if the world
| were equally divided into 24 hour "strips". Europe for
| example has CET which stretches all the way west to Spain,
| despite UTC+1 ending somewhere along the French-German
| border - so Spain and France are 1 hour "ahead" despite not
| needing to.
|
| [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/
| prmoustache wrote:
| Add to that cultural and climate differencies and it
| makes it even harder to schedule things. Like there is
| not a huge difference between France and Spain in term of
| solar hour, but rhythm is different because people in the
| south are used to take their lunch break when at the
| hottest moment of the day and tend to stay outside and up
| longer because they are most pleasant in the summer.
|
| Most people in europe keep scheduling meetings between 14
| and 16 which is pretty much lunch time here in Spain so
| most of the time I am having lunch during my video calls
| or take a quick bite in between calls without a proper
| break.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| I'd say that the biggest problem with time zones is that
| most people confuse them with time offsets (which
| unfortunately is what you are doing). A time zone is a
| geographical area. That area can run on different time
| offsets - "times". So the UK runs on UTC in winter, and
| UTC+1 in summer. It's wrong to think of the UK as being
| in the "UTC time zone".
|
| This may seem pedantic, but the confusion causes real
| problems with software.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'd say that the biggest problem with time zones is
| that most people confuse them with time offsets (which
| unfortunately is what you are doing).
|
| The problem is, say, I have a colleague in Spain. I ask
| him for a meeting today at 0800 CET, which for him means
| sunrise was at 0746, while I in Munich have had sunrise
| and got woken up by the cats at 0652.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| This might be a "problem" for people who like arbitrary
| lines to define their lives. Keeping most of Europe on
| one time zone lets people from different neighbouring and
| culturally close countries work together without needing
| to think about time zones.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| If keeping most of Europe on one timezone lets people
| work together without needing to think about time zones,
| so does unifying the entire earth on a single TAI or UTC
| "timezone".
| Kwpolska wrote:
| No, that does not scale. Sunrise and sunset are at very
| similar times in CET countries, meaning they have similar
| business hours, and I can set up a meeting between Spain,
| Poland, and the UK (which is on UTC/BST, but that's close
| enough) at 11:00 CET and everyone will be fine with it
| and well awake at that time. If we extended CET around
| the world, and wanted someone in New York to join our
| meeting, they would be furious because they would need to
| ~~wake up~~ (edit: be awake and at a computer) at 5:00
| ex-EST, or 1.5 hours before sunrise.
| zamnos wrote:
| Quick, someone tell China this won't work! China has only
| one official time zone, China Standard Time (CST) which
| is centered on Beijing, which is on the east side of the
| country. Some how, the country still hasn't fallen apart
| since this was established in 1949. Prior to this, China
| had 5 time zones.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Do you have an example that is not from an oppressive
| regime that does not care about the happiness of its
| citizens? Do you have an example that does not have an
| unofficial time zone [0] observed by people in the
| easternmost part of the country?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
| Tor3 wrote:
| I have no issues with timezones at all. Morning will be in
| the morning (as per the clock), wherever you are, and
| timezones are reasonably well defined. Without timezones
| you would _still_ need a system defining what the local
| equivalent of "morning" or "evening" or "working hours"
| is, in whatever town the person you're calling is in - and
| I feel we'll be going back to how things worked before the
| railway chaos forced the introduction of timezones.
|
| What I hate is DST. That's not only useless, it's
| problematic. Heck, my old mother never managed to handle
| the change this last fall, in her nursing home - meals
| didn't come at the optimal time, she got undernourished, it
| destroyed her sleep cycles, and her health went all
| downhill.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| As the world becomes more global, coordinating with people
| in other times zones will become the norm, not the
| exception.
|
| I expect time zones will fade away then.
|
| No need to rush it prematurely though
| zvr wrote:
| I cannot imagine a world where "the norm" of human
| interaction would be with people in other times zones.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Huh? For me it is, and has been like that for a very long
| time. I work with various customers throughout the day,
| and they are in various different timezones. When I'm not
| working I almost daily interact with family, again
| different timezone. I am always aware of various
| timezones.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Is this the norm for those people too, or are you
| basically the only one they ever talk to where timezone
| matters?
| Tor3 wrote:
| They do indeed talk to people in other timezones as well.
| We may have online meetings sometimes, with at least
| three timezones involved.
|
| I can't see how one would only contact in touch with
| people in a single timezone, unless one only wants to
| have contact with people in continental Europe (excluding
| e.g. Portugal and Finland), or people in a single
| timezone in the US. Timezones are everywhere. The earth
| is a sphere, so.. can't be avoided.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's just the online world.
|
| Most people we interact with on this site are likely in a
| different timezone, for example.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time
| here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of
| the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical
| waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early
| side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How
| much does that change over the seasons?
|
| You look up her profile in teleappnal, and it says she's
| online, so you give her a call. Easy. Or, you book a calendar
| appointment like anybody civilized, and she either accepts or
| rejects it. (Telephones are another abhorrent Victorian
| invention which we'll get rid of, and sooner than you think.)
| soneil wrote:
| Every time I see someone propose scrapping timezones, they
| end up in one of two traps. Either unilaterally dictating
| that Australia, NZ, etc become fully nocturnal - or they end
| up re-inventing timezones with a different name.
| plufz wrote:
| I'm with you on the last two but a life without timezones
| sounds horrible.
|
| So many issues, like having to relearn the clock when you are
| in another timezone. I'll meet you for lunch at 06.00! Life is
| based around the sun.
|
| Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat
| though, whether that was GMT or something less euro centric. So
| everyone would understand "we have a zoom meeting at 11.00 WT"
| instead of having to decide which timezone to refer to.
| likis wrote:
| > "Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be
| neat though ..."
|
| Don't we already have that with UTC / Zulu time?
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Do you encounter people using UTC regularly? While it's the
| closest we have to a world timezone, in my experience
| people don't use it much outside of a technical context.
|
| I usually see Americans treat Eastern Time as a standard,
| with references to Pacific sometimes. In the EU, where I
| am, CET is the usual timezone used for specifying a time
| internationally. And regardless of the location, it's very
| common for people to specify a time in their local timezone
| first and leave it to the other party to figure out what
| the difference is.
|
| I haven't encountered situations like someone saying "let's
| have a discussion at 16:00 UTC" to set up an EU-US meeting.
| benj111 wrote:
| I use it all the time. But then I live in the UK.
| likis wrote:
| I agree to an extent, but I don't really see the problem
| either. If I book a meeting or something through any
| calendar application, the timezone will be fixed to the
| local timezone. Let's say I book it for 13:00 in my
| calendar, it will show up as a meeting at 14:00 in their
| calendar if they are +1 from me.
|
| So whenever I specify a time with someone that could be
| in a different timezone, I would either make sure that I
| am using some application that solves it for me, or I
| would AT LEAST include the timezone.
|
| Maybe I'm just not encountering the same problems that
| you do.
| Symbiote wrote:
| > let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC
|
| My colleagues and I do this, but we're often involving 3,
| 4, 5+ timezones. Everyone knows their own offset from
| UTC, but I easily forgot whether Australia is on DST this
| month.
| bonzini wrote:
| UTC is nice not because it is euro centric, but because there
| is a lot of sea on the opposite side of GMT and therefore it
| is pretty easy to place the date change line. There are
| multi-timezone countries on both sides of the oceans (USA,
| Russia, and the European Union basically counts as a third)
| so the date change line has to stay on the sea.
|
| There is only one good alternative, which would be to place
| the date change line in the middle of the Atlantic (between
| UTC-3 and UTC-2) and the fundamental time zone in Japan or
| somewhere Australia (UTC+9/UTC+10).
| billpg wrote:
| I wonder which side Greenland, Iceland and the Falkland
| Islands would pick.
| bonzini wrote:
| Iceland and the Falklands would likely be respectively -9
| and +12 from Japan.
|
| Greenland is probably the best reason to keep Greenwich
| as the reference time zone. :) Most of the population (so
| to speak) is on -13 to -12. I have no idea if the people
| there have more ties to continental Europe and Iceland,
| or to Labrador.
| rendaw wrote:
| I was thinking getting rid of timezones would be crazy, but I
| work at a globe spanning all remote company and any time anyone
| discusses times it's always in UTC because everyone's in a
| different time zone and have no idea what each other's
| timezones are.
|
| So I guess I'm in the "this could work" camp.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Do you work with people in other timezones? It's much easier to
| reason about what a reasonable time is for people when you know
| how it centers up with noon for them.
| rascul wrote:
| I do. And the math needs to be done either way, if you're
| trying to determine a relation to when the sun is at its peak
| for your area vs their area.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Sure, but I work across three timezones, and I can glance
| up to the top-right of my computer and see all three at a
| very quick glance, as well as knowing when people are
| likely to be having lunch, whether it's early or late for
| someone, and so on. I'm also now quite used to "Jerry gets
| up early his time" for certain coworkers.
|
| I guess you could potentially have some sort of graphic to
| show the same thing for sunrise vs sunset ... but as you
| point out, the maths needs to be done either way, so why
| get rid of a system that works pretty well?
|
| DST is the real enemy here.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The math would've been a lot easier if GMT+0 had been
| somewhere in the Pacific ocean. Going from +1 to -7 is a
| lot more troublesome for most people than from +11 to +19.
| midoridensha wrote:
| Yeah, it would be nice if they made GMT the same as the
| international date line.
| bonzini wrote:
| The international date line is where you go from GMT-12
| to GMT+11 or something similar.
|
| So, no matter what time zone you pick as the reference,
| by definition the international date line is _12 hours
| away_ from your reference.
| defrost wrote:
| Except where it's -10 or +14 hours away from reference
| due to jogging around countries or island groups.
|
| See:
|
| https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/
| bonzini wrote:
| Yeah it zigzags a bit but it hovers on the two sides of
| +/-12, placing it around 0 would mean half the world
| operating on a work week that is shifted by one.
| bonzini wrote:
| Well, it would just move the issue to Europe wouldn't it?
| If Europe became a -10ish time zone, they would be the
| one having to go from +11 to +19.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 'I'll call you tomorrow.'
|
| 'Tomorrow clock time or tomorrow after the Sun rises?'
| scbrg wrote:
| So we'd need to adjust our terminology a bit. I'm sure the
| world wouldn't end because of that.
|
| It's always amusing to me how opponents of the idea of
| abolishing time zones assume that _everything_ will stay
| the same, except, well abolishing of time zones. Apparently
| in the moment we do so, humanity will be become incapable
| of adjusting even the slightest. It will be impossible to
| invent a couple of new terms to let people communicate
| easily about time. It will be impossible to replace time
| zone maps and time zone aware clocks with ones that show
| regular office hours in different regions, &c.
|
| For the record, I'm not even really _for_ abolishing time
| zones, but the fact that the word "tomorrow" would become
| slightly less useful is not a particularly significant
| reason.
| Taywee wrote:
| We spend a huge amount of our time talking about and
| reasoning about time. Destroying the meaning of all of
| the language we've built up is pretty significant. More
| importantly, it basically ensures that all that
| terminology will be vastly different when you live in
| different parts of the world, where the day changes in
| the morning vs the middle of the solar day vs the evening
| vs the middle of the night. Weekday names will be
| entirely regional, and their implications will be as
| well.
| mantas wrote:
| Decoupling day cycle from the sun is quite a big change.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I usually say "tomorrow your time or my time" :)
| jameshart wrote:
| _usually_ (outside of global business meetings) when you
| are talking to a person about making plans you are both
| in the same time zone. So asking 'your time or my time'
| is unnecessary.
|
| But if we got rid of time zones, you'd need new ways to
| distinguish between tomorrow meaning 'after the clock
| ticks over 24:00' bs 'after the next night cycle' because
| they would not be the same thing.
|
| To be fair the same ambiguity occurs now if you are, say,
| parting ways with someone after midnight and you say 'see
| you tomorrow', but you actually mean later that same
| calendar day.
|
| But I think losing the ability to make use, in everyday
| local conversations with people in the same place as you,
| of concepts like 'tomorrow afternoon', would be kind of a
| dealbreaker for time zone abolition.
| darkwater wrote:
| The trade-off balance is not that big towards your desire to
| justify such a gigantic mentality shift for all humanity. In
| other words, it will never happen. (Ok, maybe the DST and the
| 24h clock only can go away at some point, but TZs will stay)
| tossaway0 wrote:
| I'll meet you half way: let's place UTC next to the local time
| everywhere we can. It could be in parenthesis, in a tooltip,
| etc. It could get us all used to knowing our time in UTC and
| eventually help in cross-timezone communication.
| [deleted]
| throwaway049 wrote:
| Do you mean replace conventional wall clocks with 24 hour
| versions, all set to UTC?
|
| I object on the grounds we could no longer say it's five
| o'clock somewhere in the world when we open a bottle in the
| daytime.
| sen wrote:
| Ah but you could say "It's evening somewhere in the world!"
| ;)
| beebeepka wrote:
| Of course you've been downvoted.
|
| I believe humanity is just one generation away from being able
| to get rid of the idea that noon is 12:00 and 24:00 is
| midnight.
|
| I think I've heard all the arguments against and they all boil
| down to "no, old days are best".
| coldpie wrote:
| Without timezones, you need a lookup table for what daylight
| hours are for every location on earth. For convenience, rather
| than publishing a table for every latitude/longitude, let's
| group these locations along geographical borders nearby to
| longitude lines. We can call these grouping "zones", or in more
| broad contexts, "time zones."
|
| Hang on a second...
| mchaver wrote:
| I think even if governments around the world abolished time
| zones, tried to ban their use and forced a universal time, you
| would still end up with folk implementation of time zones that
| ends up being worse where people translate the universal time
| to and from the non-standard local time. You can see some of
| that behavior here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| No, you wouldn't: https://qntm.org/abolish
| rascul wrote:
| Yes, I would.
|
| If I need to call someone in their morning, I need to
| determine the same offset.
|
| I have plenty experience with both ends using UTC regardless
| of where in the world they are. It's much easier. Either 0425
| works for both or we need to adjust one way or the other. I
| still need to know that your schedule is four hours ahead of
| mine, but we don't need to do math to figure out what time
| 0425 is. The cognitive overhead is diminished.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| That's a pro for having UTC, not a pro for having no time
| zones. I believe this is the main reason that going against
| time zones is flawed---people don't exactly know what they
| are claiming!
| rascul wrote:
| When everyone works on the same timezone it's the same as
| not having timezones.
| [deleted]
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| The point of the parent article was that it is impossible
| to make everyone work on the same time zone, as they will
| inevitably make up their own time zones. This is not even
| a hypothetical example, the article explicitly mentions
| western China [1] where the standard time zone was so off
| that everyone uses an unofficial time zone instead.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time
| Juliate wrote:
| But when everyone doesn't live in the same spot on earth,
| it becomes tricky.
|
| Time for living things is primarily based on the course
| of the sun above their heads.
|
| Hence timezones to adjust between the local needs, and
| the worldwide synchronization.
|
| UTC is plenty enough to offer a good sync reference for
| distributed teams. Swatch beats was a good idea too, but
| failed.
| raydiatian wrote:
| If you're on the same planet and or moon thereof, it should "be"
| the same time wherever you go. Everybody should use UTC always.
| No more scheduling "wait did you mean EST or CT" bs, no more
| timestamp BS, no more BIOS --sysclocktohw. We're evolved apes, we
| should use UTC.
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| Once I had the same opinion and was a great fan of Swatch Beat
| concept. This text changed my mind: https://qntm.org/abolish
| jjkeddo199 wrote:
| I am just a fool who doesn't know anything, so take my thoughts
| with a grain of salt, but I think all the ideas shared here are
| too complicated and have too many breaking changes. I think a
| lunar timezone or martian timezone is a horrible idea. We need
| instead to have _planetary offsets_. How many insidious and
| horrible date /time bugs would we signing 22nd century
| programmers up for by trying to mishmash different planetary
| timezones together?
|
| Keep it simple! If we added a celestial offset, it would work for
| the moon, mars, and any other planet we wanted to visit! Time
| could be stored as follows:
|
| ``` 1) Time of day 2) Timezone 3) Celestial Offset (PlanetX:Earth
| seconds per day ratio) 4) Calendar (Gregorian, Japanese, Islamic,
| Lunar, Martian) 5) Solar System ```
|
| Boom! Problem solved.
| ordu wrote:
| Does clock ticks on Moon when no one there can hear in vacuum?
| cornholio wrote:
| I am a proponent of a Martian timekeeping system where each day
| has 24 hours 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds and all the rest of
| time units have standard lengths. For example, at midnight your
| martian clock would show the time as 24:39:35 for a fraction of a
| second, then wound back to 00:00:00. The calendar then would
| track the Earth calendar as close as possible, with shortened
| months to accommodate for the longer days.
|
| Basically, everything is roughly in sync with Earth and uses
| similar or identical units, except the time of day which is
| synced to the martian solar day, the only local time of relevance
| to the martians, for things like working light and circadian
| rhythm, solar panel irradiation etc. The "seasons" of Mars are of
| little relevance due to the very artificial conditions in which
| the martians will live, the weather outside is deadly all year
| long with slight variations in deadliness.
|
| So the entire idea of keeping a martian calendar with funny month
| names doesn't really make sense, the only thing martians will
| care is the time of the next Earth transport and the dates on
| Earth so they can relate with their loved ones. As is the idea of
| having different lengths of seconds and hours, which will render
| almost all Earth equipment and measurements unusable, as opposed
| to a slight tweak in the software of their clocks to enable times
| past 23:59:59.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| > each day has 24 hours 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds
|
| > at midnight your martian clock would show the time as
| 24:39:35 for a fraction of a second
|
| A similar idea could be to have exactly 24h 39min 35s each day
| (i.e. the last second before midnight is 24:39:34), then add a
| leap second every 4 days to compensate for the missing 0.244s,
| then skip it when the 0.006s errors cumulate up to 1s.
|
| This just because in my opinion it is easier to live with leap
| seconds than with non-integer seconds.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _This just because in my opinion it is easier to live with
| leap seconds than with non-integer seconds._
|
| That is not the opinion of a bunch of folks who want to get
| rid of the leap second on Earth:
|
| * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03783-5
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658541
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Is the difference in quality of life so dramatic with a day
| wrapping on non-integer seconds when both proposals wrap at
| non-integer minutes and non-integer hours?
|
| The real question is why stop at miliseconds - it seems
| inconsequential. Go all the way down and assume that as the
| hour/minute/second granularity all proved insufficient in the
| past, the same way milliseconds would become insufficient one
| day. Make the period parameterizable (i.e. not a constant),
| with only the current value at 24 hours 39 minutes 35 seconds
| 244 milliseconds.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| I would support the use of this on Earth as well.
|
| I love that feeling when the clocks go back in Autumn. This
| would give you that every day. My natural circadian rhythm is
| about 24.5 hours. I enjoy the dark, and this schedule would
| provide variety as our waking hours cycled in and out of phase
| with the sun.
|
| And it would make scheduling regular Earth-Mars communications
| much simpler.
| [deleted]
| aqme28 wrote:
| Mars explorer teams keep shifts in Mars time and have special
| Martian watches and alarm clocks.
|
| It sounds nice to me. Having an extra 40 minutes in a day seems
| about perfect.
| skissane wrote:
| > The calendar then would track the Earth calendar as close as
| possible, with shortened months to accommodate for the longer
| days.
|
| Why bother with months? Why not just count weeks? You could use
| something like the ISO 8601 week calendar - the year is divided
| into weeks. Weeks run Monday (1) to Sunday (7). Every year
| beings on a Monday - ISO 8601 has two years, the Gregorian year
| (starts on 1 January) and the ISO week year (always starts on
| Monday). The ISO week year always contains a whole number of
| weeks, either 52 or 53, so the first day of the ISO week year
| is often a few days before or after 1 January. 2023-W09-2 is an
| ISO week date, it is the 2nd day (Tuesday) of the 9th week of
| 2023.
|
| So, here's my idea for a Martian calendar. The base unit is the
| Martian day (sol) of 24h39m35.244s. 7 Martian days is a Martian
| week. The calendar year is based on the Earth year, but it
| starts on the Monday of the Martian week closest to 1 Jan 00:00
| UTC.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _You could use something like the ISO 8601 week calendar -
| the year is divided into weeks._
|
| Note that ISO 8601 weeks can be non-intuitive: per the
| Gregorian calendar, December 30, 2019, was in 2019; but per
| ISO 8601, December 30 it was in Week 1 Year 2020. Tom Scott:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3jxx8Yyw1c
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Months are nice to have
| slim wrote:
| Sensorwatch has a watch face with iso8601 weeknumber (which I
| did)
|
| https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-
| Watch/blob/main/movem...
| t0suj4 wrote:
| I think it would be better to have two separate clocks, one
| tracking solar time with arbitrarily defined beginning, one
| UTC. Both would rollover after 23:59:59.
|
| It's easier to explain that a second on Mars is longer because
| it's spinning slower than all the quirks of rollover at an
| seemingly random value.
|
| The meaning of seasons on Mars would evolve with how we
| understand the impact of martian weather on daily life. Try to
| explain winter to someone living all his life on the equator.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Despite this, I'm an advocate for martian self-determination
| when it comes to deciding their timekeeping system. Earthlings,
| despite their good intentions, should stay out of the matter
| categorically.
| cornholio wrote:
| I agree; but unless we discover some inteligent indigenous
| species, Martian self determination can happen only if
| earthlings will go and live on Mars. And for that, they will
| need clocks, clocks made on Earth by other earthlings.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Everyone says this but reality never seems to work out that
| way when push comes to shove.
|
| Will you be singing that tune when a religious minority you
| hate moves there, establishes a theocratic government, starts
| teaching women to read, hanging undesirables and
| troublemakers and regressing on pretty much every human right
| your ancestors died for, bonus points for starting a war with
| the locals.
|
| That said, in the historical example I'm referencing the
| state was too weak to do much about them from afar and they
| did clean itself up after subsequent immigration diluted
| their culture over the following 100yr. God what a bunch of
| assholes they were in the meantime though...
| tdba wrote:
| You are of course talking about the Ottoman conquest of
| Constantinople.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| I was thinking the English settlement of eastern
| Massachusetts and the Connecticut river valley but I
| guess that works too.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I refuse to get involved in Martian politics. You can CIA
| them however you want though. I'm sure you can find just as
| many instances where foreign meddling and infantilization
| of people had disastrous consequences.
|
| You'll be happy to know that you can appreciate their input
| on Earth matters as much as they'll appreciate yours on
| martian matters.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| What about Belters?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
| cwkoss wrote:
| They'd probably keep the time of their primary trade
| partners. I feel like there is a nautical precedent, but
| can't remember specifically.
|
| Does everyone on the ISS stick to the same time zone? Or do
| they tend to sleep with their country of origin?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Does everyone on the ISS stick to the same time zone?
| Or do they tend to sleep with their country of origin?_
|
| UTC for everyone.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone just
| gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone
| just gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move.
|
| For anything legal, scientific, etc., dealing with time or
| speed (tracking experiments, wage and hour laws, etc.) you
| need to be able to track time during the clock pause, which
| will lead to adoption (by social convention, if nothing else)
| of a standard method of recording times within the pause,
| which leads to clocks that display in that format times
| during the pause. "All clocks stop for 40 minutes" is not a
| stable equilibrium.
| benj111 wrote:
| Yes but if you work the night shift you get shafted.
|
| And when the clocks go back in autumn you get the 40 minute
| period twice.
| ajuc wrote:
| This breaks all computer games and also internet (I think?).
| toast0 wrote:
| IP doesn't have a requirement for clock synchronization.
| Certificate validation does need clock synchronization, but
| most of the time rough synchronization works; you only need
| precise synchronization if you present certiticates close
| to their not-before or not-after dates.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| I have had to make my computer believe that I was in Japan
| to play certain videogames. There was also that fascinating
| time I had to roll back the calendar to use a crack for a
| Denuvo protected game.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| And might make planes fall from the sky, rather like the
| problem with the F35 and international date line.
| euroderf wrote:
| Cue sci-fi dystopia where the totalitarian Mars gov't gases
| (or somehow otherwise knocks out) everyone for 40 minutes
| while they search the place and haul off dissidents.
| lb1lf wrote:
| You definitely need to watch Dark City (if you haven't
| already!)
|
| The movie does a variation on this exact plot. Very well,
| even.
| euroderf wrote:
| Yes, have seen it. Yes, had the same thought.
|
| ("Great minds think alike.")
| Oxidation wrote:
| The Martian "timeslip" in Red Mars works exactly kind this,
| if I recall. I assume that's a reference to the Philip K.
| Dick novel of the same name.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's a cute SF idea, but would be awful to live under.
| cornholio wrote:
| It's basically the same thing, but harder to achieve
| technically because many things assume clocks are moving all
| the time. For example timers and timeouts are frequently
| implemented as loops polling system time has reached a
| certain future value. Many things break or malfunction if a
| large number of things happen at the same time, for example
| logging, crons etc. Imagine investigating a cybersecurity
| event perpetrated in the gap and finding all file dates and
| logtimes as unreliable.
| eru wrote:
| Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth).
| Timezones are just for displaying to humans.
| planede wrote:
| They really should have been on TAI. I guess it doesn't
| matter now if we won't get any more leap seconds.
| cornholio wrote:
| It's worth noting that even atomic clocks run on Mars
| faster than on Earth, due to the different gravity. So
| you might expect say half of the 50 microsecond daily
| gain quoted in this article for the Moon, 10 miliseconds
| per year or a full second per century, more than enough
| to make you your spaceship completely miss its intended
| orbit. And martians will definitely want to run their own
| atomic clocks, making sync very problematic.
|
| So TAI is not the end all for what I expect to be a very
| complicated technical problem.
| eru wrote:
| Not sure whether sync will be 'very problematic'.
|
| We already have that sort of sync happening today: when
| your computer is off, it runs a quartz watch. When you
| turn it on, it syncs via ntp.
|
| Some special boffins on Mars would run atomic clocks, and
| worry about synchronisation with earth.
|
| For the rest of the people running quartz clocks, they
| wouldn't even notice.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Some special boffins on Mars would run atomic clocks,
| and worry about synchronisation with earth.
|
| I think at some point, you have to redefine utc to be
| based on an estimated atomic clock at the center of the
| sun, because it's easier for mars and earth to estimate
| that, than for earth to go on its merry way and mars to
| estimate the time on earth. Relativism is fun?
| msm_ wrote:
| How is stopping the clock for 40 minutes human friendly?
| I'm a night owl and there are many things in my life that
| happen between 00:00 and 00:40, can't imagine pretending
| they all somehow happen in the same moment.
| epse wrote:
| Probably, but even Windows would break in this scenario.
| It interprets the hardware clock as being in local time
| and derives UTC from that (you can change that with a
| registry change, but it isn't very reliable in my
| experience)
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Keeping the clock in UTC is reliable on Windows 10/11.
| Windows will happily read and write to the clock in UTC,
| and things like NTP sync just work.
|
| Source: 2 years of heavy Windows 10/11 usage with that
| setting.
| remram wrote:
| Timers sound like they should be using a monotonic timer
| actually, so they are not affected by the system clock
| being adjusted.
| jjkeddo199 wrote:
| Planetary body should be a new offset category/type that
| defaults to Earth. Instead of tracking time as
| time:offset:date:calendar, we should do
| time:offset:date:calendar:planetTimeOffsetRatio. If
| calendarplanetTimeOffsetRatio is 1.02777778 (Mars:Earth days),
| number of seconds available in the day is increased by
| 2.777778%
| claviola wrote:
| Do you honestly consider modifying the core idea of the 24 hour
| day to be a "slight tweak"? I can't even imagine how many
| different things rely on that assumption.
|
| (and I'm sorry, but what does "naming months and seasons in
| Mars" have to do with this?)
| cornholio wrote:
| > and I'm sorry, but what does "naming months and seasons in
| Mars" have to do with this?
|
| Time of day and calendaring and discussed together because
| they allow you to ask things like "what was the date and time
| on Mars prime meridian on Feb 2 2023 6:00 UTC" and get a
| recognizable date and time back. It's essentially a timezone,
| albeit a very strange one with a variable offset.
|
| > modifying the core idea of the 24 hour day to be a "slight
| tweak"?
|
| Ok, maybe an exaggerated hand-wave on my part. It's a slight
| software tweak on my desk clock. I was contrasting with the
| alternative of modifying a fundamental SI unit and more or
| less rebuilding from scratch all hardware sent on Mars. The
| fuckups alone resulting from confusing Earth seconds with
| Mars seconds.
| yrro wrote:
| The very first entry on the list of falsehoods programmers
| believe about time[0] is that there are always 24 hours in a
| day.
|
| [0] https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606
| b4b...
|
| 23:59:60 happens when we add leap seconds to the clock, for
| instance...
| jefftk wrote:
| _> there are always 24 hours in a day_
|
| Daylight savings time is a much larger departure from this
| rule ;)
|
| _> 23:59:60 happens when we add leap seconds to the clock_
|
| Not anymore! Or, maybe not anymore. We've agreed to phase
| out leap seconds before 2035 [1] and we probably won't get
| a 23:59:60 before then [2].
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03783-5
|
| [2] https://manifold.markets/Yev/will-there-be-another-
| positive-...
| yrro wrote:
| Oh, I didn't realise that this proposal had been adopted!
|
| I read[0] that "It will take about 50,000 years for a
| mean solar day to lengthen by one second (at a rate of 2
| ms per century)" and "The [accumulated] difference
| between UTC and UT would reach 0.5 hours after the year
| 2600 and 6.5 hours around 4600" which I expect will be
| sufficient to take us through to the time where we will
| no longer need co-ordinated time or an IERS.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
| claviola wrote:
| I wasn't talking about software development by itself, but
| human behaviour.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Human behavior will largely just appreciate the extra
| half hour of sleep each day.
|
| Round-the-clock shiftwork (hospitals, power plants, etc.)
| will require minor tweaking; your eight hour shift
| probably just becomes 8:10 or so.
|
| (It's worse for humans _on Earth_ working Mars time,
| which is a thing that already happens. They come in 40
| mins later every day.
| https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/20090/living-on-mars-
| time/)
| skissane wrote:
| For software that runs on Mars, I think "Mars date/time" has
| to be a brand new set of APIs and data types. The existing
| date/time APIs/types are for Earth times only. The "local
| time zone" on Mars would just be UTC. That way there wouldn't
| be much possibility of bugs based on confusing Earth and Mars
| time scales - all pre-existing software would still work with
| Earth date/times, and anything that needed to deal with Mars
| date/times specifically would have to be modified to handle
| them.
| RedNifre wrote:
| No, Mars has less mass than Earth, so if you use Earth UTC,
| Mars seconds will be longer than SI seconds, which does not
| seem like a good idea.
| skissane wrote:
| I think you misunderstood my point - I was saying make
| _both_ Earth UTC and some Martian time scale available,
| just use a new API and data types for the latter. Which
| one to use in any given use case will be up to the
| application developer.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Way easier than changing the rotation speed of mars.
| manojlds wrote:
| _cough_ leap second _cough_
| claviola wrote:
| Sure, the leap second is a thing. We still represent the
| day as 24 hours for humans. They didn't seem to be talking
| about an "under the hood" hand waving of a significant part
| of the day.
| wongarsu wrote:
| You have basically three options for timekeeping on mars:
| adjust the day, adjust the second, or give up on days syncing
| with the (apparent) movement of the sun.
|
| The first option breaks mostly assumptions made in software
| and processes, the second mostly assumptions made in
| hardware, and the third breaks human's circadian rythm (a 23
| or 25 hour rythm isn't a big deal, but it has to sync to
| light).
|
| Of those three, the things that rely on 24 hour days seem to
| be the easiest to change. Though there is precedent both to
| messing with the length of a day (a leap second makes the day
| one second longer, making 23:59:60 a valid time) and the
| length of a second (google pretends like seconds are slightly
| longer as an alternative way to deal with leap seconds)
| claviola wrote:
| I must have missed something. This article is about the
| Moon.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| And comment you replied to is about Mars.
| jefftk wrote:
| But it's not clear why that author decided to talk about
| Mars. They didn't connect their comment to to the article
| at all.
| cornholio wrote:
| Sorry about that, I was just throwing somewhere at the
| bottom of the comment section an off-topic ideea I've
| been toying with. Didn't expect it will raise such
| interest and be voted towards the top.
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| No need to apologize. We knew what we were doing when
| upvoting a comment by the great cornholio.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| Nobody is going to be having real-time Zoom calls between Earth
| and Mars so I'm not sure how in sync it needs to be.
|
| It does make sense to at least keep the second the same since
| that is a critical base SI unit that affects lots of other
| things.
|
| One interesting problem will be that high precision atomic
| clocks will run at a slightly different rate on the surface of
| Mars due to the lower gravitational potential, but this is
| easily solvable as it is on GPS satellites.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Nobody is going to be having real-time Zoom calls between
| Earth and Mars so I 'm not sure how in sync it needs to be._
|
| If a contract say "the payment must be received before March
| 1, 2123", then you have to worry about time syncing between
| the planets. How fast are fund transfers between planets?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If a contract say "the payment must be received before
| March 1, 2123"_
|
| Then the contract is incompletely specified. March 1, 2123
| according to whose time?
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Since there is no and will never be any people on mars for more
| than few months, there is no point of having a special time
| beside UTC
| crote wrote:
| Wouldn't that get incredibly confusing with the calendar always
| being _slightly_ off, despite using the same names? At that
| point why not just stick to a integer day count for the date.
|
| Having a non-integer number of hours in a day might also get
| confusing. It would be near-impossible to make an analog clock,
| for example, and stuff like dividing up a day into three shifts
| would be really cumbersome. For day-to-day life redefining the
| second might end up being a lot easier.
| cornholio wrote:
| > Wouldn't that get incredibly confusing with the calendar
| always being slightly off, despite using the same names?
|
| I think you can keep the calendar within +/- one day of a
| certain Earth location by carefully adjusting the length of
| the months. So it would be much like the dates vary on Earth
| between time zones, for example at the time I'm writing this
| the date in Hawaii is March 1st, while my local date is March
| 2nd. But less predictable, yes.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| People under 30 don't use the "circular clock" anyway. Mars
| will do fine without it.
| jcla1 wrote:
| That is definitely not true - I have an analog wrist watch
| (and am under 30). Also, there can be benefits to the use
| of analog clocks: in some circumstances they're quicker to
| read the time off of.
|
| http://www.mcld.co.uk/blog/2006/digital-vs-analogue-
| clocks.h...
| cornholio wrote:
| Have your circular dial divided in 24.658 sections then.
|
| Nothing good can come from using a slightly longer second
| then what absolutely every piece of Earth hardware
| expects. Unless you are billion dollar rover mission
| where every bit or hardware is a custom design, it's
| imperative to use Earth seconds.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's not true of every young person in 2023, but that
| knowledge is fading away.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > It would be near-impossible to make an analog clock, for
| example,
|
| Why would that be an issue? You still have the hours hand
| make a full rotation in one period, and you make markings at
| each hour. You just have separate markings at 24 o'clock and
| 0 o'clock.
| wmanley wrote:
| and the minute hand?
| [deleted]
| cornholio wrote:
| Separate inner markings, like on most 24 hour earth
| clocks I find on Google images. When you've lost clean
| divisibility with 5, conflating the dials to make every
| hour house 2.5 minutes is already not a nice design.
|
| Of course, you need mechanically handle the jumping ahead
| of the minutes and seconds arms.
|
| What you get tends to look like a very precise
| chronometer, the type a Mars scientist would wear.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Still goes at 1 rotation per hour. You put the minute
| markings on another wheel to precess each day. The hour
| and minute hands won't form the same angle at the same
| time each day, but it will still tell the correct time.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Still think life would be simpler if we all just adopted .beats
| (Swatch Internet Time):
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
| sen wrote:
| I was so convinced .beats would take over the world (or solar
| system in this case). I had their watch, I installed their
| task-bar clock plugin for Windows 98, I harped on about it to
| my friends... a surprising number of which actually agreed it
| was a good idea.
|
| Then it just kinda fizzled out. I'm still upset it didn't take
| off.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| I never heard of this before but now that I looked it up I
| think it's a good idea. People will probably still want to
| keep their local times but at least for coordinating
| international stuff we should have one standard time for the
| entire world. It's insane that we still have to look up how
| certain time zones correlate to our own local times for
| online meetings and such. This can all be improved. Remember
| back in the day there weren't even time zones, each city used
| their own local time. That's basically the situation we're in
| now from a global point of view.
| davnicwil wrote:
| For meeting coordination I think we will probably just
| converge around a defacto standard existing timezone like
| UTC.
|
| We would all develop an intuition for what different times
| in UTC 'mean' (first thing in morning, after lunch, mid
| afternoon, etc) relative to the one we're in so we're not
| looking it up all the time. Maybe keep a UTC clock showing
| on relevant devices.
|
| I don't think there's a need for a completely new system.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I have a UTC clock in my Mac menu bar already. I expect I
| always will.
| coldpie wrote:
| We already have that, it's UTC. And we don't need to learn
| a whole new system of time measurement to use it.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Currently you have to know all your timezones and do the
| conversions in your head if you travel a lot for example.
| Additionally the organizers of many events and
| conferences, even very international ones, do not use
| UTC. So no, UTC doesn't solve that problem in practical
| terms. If the entire world used UTC for their local time,
| then it would be a similar solution. I personally
| wouldn't mind that actually. It would take a bit to get
| used to but in the long run it makes much more sense in
| an ever more globalized world.
|
| Same as the world adopting the metric system, and in
| science specifically SI-units. Surely you agree even
| though that was a bit of a hassle when countries changed
| over from their old unique units at the time, in the long
| run it was the right decision. Imagine what it would be
| like working in an international team always having to
| convert units of measurement. It's still an issue in
| engineering sometimes, because outside of science the US
| didn't make the switch and it's extremely annoying.
| coldpie wrote:
| You have to know how the sun behaves at your local
| position relative to the universal time regardless of
| whether we call that knowledge "time zones" or something
| else. It sounds like what you want is for everyone to be
| more explicit about their time zone: instead of saying
| "the conference starts at 3 PM" they should say, "the
| conference starts at 3 PM UTC-6", right? From that you
| can easily derive that it's 9 PM UTC, and interpret that
| however you like for your current location.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Maybe you haven't experienced it yet but it's not as
| simple. I live in different countries and regularly have
| to deal with this. There's often confusion about time
| zones. Sure, it's "just a simple" conversion in theory
| but firstly the point is that ideally you should not have
| to do this at all and secondly no one calls it "UTC-6".
| You're lucky if they add a time zone at all, and when
| they do it's usually "EST", "Beijing time", "Eastern"
| (which can be Australian, American or whatever, your job
| to know from context), etc. Then you have to deal with
| DST, but only in _some_ countries during _some_ parts of
| the year. And don 't forget the countries that add half
| hours, or Nepal which is extra special with an additional
| 3/4 because why not. It's utter madness.
|
| Unless you're a savant who can remember all regions with
| corresponding time zones and all the exceptions, you'd be
| looking this up, which is what people normally do.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It didn't work in 1793 when it was mandated by the Convention
| despite the rest of the metric system taking roots.
|
| It was unlikely that a rebrand by a greedy Swiss corporation
| would make it more popular.
|
| Plus, current time keeping already use superior base systems.
| 12 and 60 are both highly composite numbers. Using a decimal
| system would be a step back. I wish we had symbols for 10 and
| 11 however.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I still have a Decimal time app on my phone, though. My
| Mac, too, thanks for Catalyst.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| Having your unit system in the same base as your number
| system infinitely outweighs any advantages derived from the
| having a higher number of factors or whatever. If you want
| to switch out number system, and then change the unit
| system alongside that, I'll hear you out. But skipping the
| number system and doing it at the unit level is always dead
| on arrival as an argument.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| If it were the case, people would have switched massively
| to a decimal time keeping system.
|
| The fact they did not is proof enough for me that using
| the same base than our number system isn't relevant. It
| makes sense intuitively because it's extremely rare that
| we have to go above 24 for hours and sixty for minutes
| while we divide these time periods fairly often.
|
| I would gladly switch to base 12 just to have simpler
| multiplication tables (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10 are
| really simple, 9 and A are fine while 5, 7 and B are
| annoying) but I am no fool and realise it's never going
| to happen.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Ah, the classic argument for why Amurican
| Measurements(tm) must also be superior, conveniently
| ignoring the rest of the world being very metric.
|
| My personal observation is that nobody divides hours into
| more than halves or quarters, and .5, .25, .75 are pretty
| simple.
|
| Consider this: 1 USD is 100 cents, and people are just
| fine with its common fractions.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Well, no, it's not this argument because as you
| rightfully pointed everyone did switch to the metric
| system while absolutely no one switched to decimal time.
| I'm French by the way.
|
| People do divide hours in twelfth, sixth and third all
| the time. Thinking in blocks of 5 and 10 minutes is very
| common.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Thinking in blocks of 5 and 10 units is very common in
| metric systems too. The fact that 10 minutes is 1/6th of
| an hour is not very relevant; that it's a good size unit
| for pragmatic use is.
| eru wrote:
| In decimal, in general in decimal to write a fractions you
| need an infinite number of digits (with repetition). We
| have convenient notation for that repetition. A few special
| fractions can be written with finitely many digits.
|
| Using base 12 or 60 you are in the same situation.
|
| If you want elegance, you should cut down on the number of
| special cases.
|
| Hence I would suggest to use a base like 11 or 59. That way
| more fractions will be covered by the general case.
|
| Base 11 also works well for counting on your fingers.
| (Though base 6 works for that one as well.)
| ted_dunning wrote:
| You are off here a bit.
|
| ALL decimal, base 12 and base 60 expansions of rational
| numbers end in a repeating sequence. Just like base 11
| and 59.
|
| The only difference between 1/7 and 1/5 in decimal is
| that for the 1/7, the repeating sequence is 7 digits long
| (142857) and for 1/5 the repeating sequence is 1 digit
| long (0). In base 12, 1/5 has a 4 digit repeating
| sequence (2497).
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 12 and 60 are both optimal cases for what you are
| describing.
|
| That's what highly composite numbers are: the set of
| natural numbers having more divisors than all smaller
| ones. 12 is the smallest number having 6 divisors and 60
| the smallest one having 12.
|
| Both 11 and 59 would be inconvenient bases. They are
| primes.
| eru wrote:
| 12 and 60 just introduce more special cases, exactly
| because they have so many divisors.
|
| Prime numbers have no non-trivial divisors. So more
| fractions get handled by the general case, the case of
| infinitely repeated digits.
|
| > 12 and 60 are both optimal cases for what you are
| describing.
|
| Optimal in what sense? They are certainly more
| convenient. I was describing mathematical elegance.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > Prime numbers have no non-trivial divisors. So more
| fractions get handled by the general case, the case of
| infinitely repeated digits.
|
| I don't understand what you mean by special cases and
| general cases.
|
| R\Q is dense in R so most numbers can't be written as
| repeating digits at all whatever the base you are using
| and in every bases all numbers which have a finite
| representation also have a repeating one by subtracting 1
| to the last digit and adding an infinity of the biggest
| available digit after (decimal representations are not
| unique).
|
| Generally you want more divisors for your base. The more
| divisors you have the nicer the fractional part is likely
| to look like for common operations.
| [deleted]
| eru wrote:
| I am not talking about numbers in R. I am talking about
| representing numbers from Q in a decimal fraction. (Or in
| a fraction to basis 11 or 12 or 60 etc.)
|
| (I'm not sure why anyone would want to bring up R? Why R
| and not eg p-adic numbers? Or algebraic numbers?)
|
| General case: your fraction p/q will be expressed as some
| repeating decimal fraction, like 22/7 = 3.|142857 (where
| | marks the start of the repeat.)
|
| Special case: your fraction p/q will be expressed by a
| decimal fraction that stops. Like 2/5 = 0.4 or so.
|
| You can't get rid of the general case. No matter what
| base you pick, the representation of the vast majority of
| your fractions will have infinite repeats.
|
| You can however minimize the occurrences of the special
| case by picking a base with fewer divisors.
|
| In contrast, picking a base with more divisors, like 12
| or 60 gives you more special cases to worry about.
|
| (And yes, you can apply the trick you suggested, to sort
| of remove the special case by writing 0.4 as 0.3|9. Or
| for that matter as 0.4|0; but I'm not sure that last one
| buys you anything.)
|
| Just to be clear: this is all a bit tongue in cheek and
| just talking about what system is mathematically more
| elegant, by having fewer special cases. In practice,
| having more divisors is convenient; though in practice
| just rounding after some number of digits is also fine.
| benj111 wrote:
| How does base 11 work for counting on your fingers?
|
| Last I checked, most of us have only 10 digits
| ted_dunning wrote:
| I use 8 fingers with two thumbs for carrying.
|
| That can be interpreted mathematically or practically.
| eru wrote:
| With your ten digits, it's easy to symbolize eleven
| digits: zero, one, two, ..., nine and ten. Hence base
| eleven is very convenient.
|
| Base six is probably most practical for this: You can
| count from zero to five on your left hand. When you go to
| six, you close your left hand (go to zero) and increment
| the count on your right hand by one. Two hands let you
| count from zero to thirty-five (inclusive).
| benj111 wrote:
| Yes sorry. That's a good, (and obvious) point
| [deleted]
| yencabulator wrote:
| They might have had better luck if they hadn't tried to define
| it around the location of their headquarters.
| jefftk wrote:
| In addition to being branded, not being a multiple of seconds
| is pretty terrible.
|
| (1 s = 0.011574 .beats)
| christiangenco wrote:
| Ugh, yes! I keep coming back to .beats as the general solution
| for all time-related problems.
|
| Here's my small contribution to furthering the effort:
| https://beats.wiki
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Your heart rate then becomes unitless
| benj111 wrote:
| Beats per beat? I can think of more confusing language
| constructs.
|
| Plus acceleration is metres per second per second and that
| isn't unitless.
|
| One solution though would be to make use of one of the freed
| up words and use minute instead of beat. So we could say
| minutes per beat. Does that deal with your concern?
| yencabulator wrote:
| I really fail to see why they wouldn't just use UTC.
|
| > There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster
| on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each
| day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking
| occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.
|
| And all computer clocks need to be corrected for drift anyway.
| Standard mechanisms for dealing with unruly oscillators should
| have no trouble with that.
|
| > Perhaps most importantly, lunar time will have to be practical
| for astronauts there, noted the space agency's Bernhard
| Hufenbach.
|
| > "This will be quite a challenge" with each day lasting as long
| as 29.5 Earth days,
|
| And humans are adjusted for a roughly 24-26 hour day cycle, which
| UTC handily gives you. Whether it happens to correlate with the
| natural light/dark cycle, well, you've lost that fight here
| anyway, it's not like they'd stay awake for 29.5 days and then
| sleep 29.5 days. Same thing for the ISS: every "day" they get 16
| sunrises and sunsets. Of course they'll use artificial lighting
| to regulate sleep.
|
| Not a single justification for complicating things.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| True, but UTC drift calculations on earth are different from on
| the moon. Fundamentally there _is_ another time standard on the
| moon. How we account for that is up to us, but it makes sense
| to formalize this IMO. You could perhaps try to first derive a
| galactic or stelar time standard, then make both the moon 's
| and earth's a derivative, but that seems even more complex in a
| way, though perhaps the most elegant in another.
|
| Point is, the moon experiences time slightly differently than
| the earth, so having a clear reference will help
| synchronization, both to familiar geocentric standards as well
| as while on the moon.
|
| I don't think we should define days around the petty need of
| humans. Even calendars are setup to map roughly to larger
| systems like phases of the moon / tides or orbits around the
| sun. The fact that an astronaught needs to sleep many times in
| a single "day" should not be a concern for the reference
| day/time, but could perhaps influence the time zones?
| yencabulator wrote:
| > True, but UTC drift calculations on earth are different
| from on the moon.
|
| Hey reference clock, what time do you see? Oh, it's X? And
| I'm at Y? Okay, I'll adjust my drift correction factor to Z.
|
| They might drift more than good modern-day clocks, and the
| latency to the reference clock might be higher, but the basic
| mechanism of correcting for the drift shouldn't be any
| different.
|
| What's the difference between taking a good clock to the
| moon, where it runs 56 microseconds fast each day, versus
| having a less-tuned oscillator that runs 56 microseconds fast
| each day?
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's not drift. Time passes more quickly on the moon, to
| such an extent that there are 56 microseconds more each day
| on the lunar surface than on Earth. This is a an effect of
| general relativity.
|
| For everyday human-scale stuff, sure this doesn't matter.
| For precise scientific and industrial use cases, it does.
| yencabulator wrote:
| I repeat myself: What's the difference between taking a
| good clock to the moon, where it runs 56 microseconds
| fast each day, versus having a less-tuned oscillator that
| runs 56 microseconds fast each day?
| zymhan wrote:
| Because of the need to convert between the two systems.
|
| It's not just about keeping time on the moon. It's
| reconciling that with other places in the solar system
| yencabulator wrote:
| If they run on UTC, and correct for drift like any clock
| needs to do, what else is there? What conversion, what
| two systems?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Clock slew is unacceptable for many use cases. For
| keeping system time on a UNIX server or for astronaut
| watches, sure. For many other things you need a precise
| and accurate count of how many micro/nano/pico seconds
| have passed. You can't just have one second suddenly be N
| nanoseconds longer and expect sensitive experiments to
| not be affected.
| starkd wrote:
| >> I don't think we should define days around the petty need
| of humans.
|
| Why not? Are you being considerate for alien life? As far as
| we know, humans are the only ones who are going to use it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I read it as computers being the primary target for any
| clock system
| fluoridation wrote:
| Computers don't really care about the current wall time.
| They just care about measuring time between events. If a
| piece of software about the current day of the week it's
| only because a person cares about it and wants to do
| something special on certain days of the week.
|
| So, yes, time systems should be designed around the needs
| of people.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I believe time systems should be designed around the
| physics of the natural systems we inhabit. This may help
| us mere humans better harmonize with the rest of that
| which makes up our worlds.
|
| This may sound a bit hippy dippy at first, but just
| consider how much light pollution effect other creatures,
| for a quick example.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The time between events is different as measured on the
| Moon than on Earth. That's what is being talked about
| here.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Fully agree. I think some of the proposed lunar base locations
| have near constant sunlight for much of the year - rendering
| any mapping to period dark/light periods mostly irrelevant.
|
| The impact of gravity is relevant of course. There is no reason
| not to use Earth as the reference however.
| muyuu wrote:
| why not just leaving it UTC? it's not like time zones make sense
| on Earth anymore so why start it? plus there are no Earth-like
| daylight patterns there that humans could possibly adapt their
| sleep to, lasting weeks at a time
| lolinder wrote:
| > There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster
| on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each
| day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking
| occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.
|
| At first this sounded like they were describing a mechanical
| issue with analog clocks, but they're not: time on the moon
| actually moves this much faster relative to Earth because Earth's
| gravity warps time more than the moon's does.
| aerophilic wrote:
| This is interesting... and I wonder how this plays out across
| different planetary bodies. It effectively means how we define
| a second will be different across the board.
|
| Can anyone weigh in on whether the MKS standard of a second is
| based on something in free space, or here on earth?
|
| If universal (based on free space) Would this mean we should
| all convert to/from this second, and treat our own second as
| relative?
| Diggsey wrote:
| It doesn't really work like that: a second is a second
| anywhere in the universe, but time at different places in the
| universe doesn't progress at the same rate.
|
| ie. the issue is not with how we define the second. The issue
| is expecting that if two people in different frames of
| reference wait for one second, that they will continue to be
| "synchronised".
|
| In fact it's worse than that, it's impossible to even define
| the concept of "synchronisation" for entities in different
| locations. You can only know that two things are synchronised
| if they are in the same location.
|
| If the two entities are in the same frame of reference (ie.
| not moving or accelerating relative to each other) then you
| could argue that you just send a beam of light there and
| back, and assume the light takes the same time in each
| direction in order to synchronise... But we don't even know
| that light travels at the same speed in all directions! We've
| never been able to measure the "one-directional" speed of
| light, we can only measure the round-trip, so for all we know
| light could have a preferred direction in the universe and
| travel faster in that direction, as long as it is the same
| amount slower in the other direction. We would never be able
| to tell.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Not big deal, we already correct for this problem in GPS
| dylan604 wrote:
| "The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical
| value of the caesium frequency, DnCs, the unperturbed ground-
| state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom,
| to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is
| equal to s-1.[1]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
|
| so unless caesium behaves differently at different locations
| in the universe, this definition should be pretty uniform.
| lolinder wrote:
| Cesium on the moon would continue to have the same
| frequency _on the moon_ , but a cesium clock on the moon
| would run 56 microseconds fast per day relative to an
| identical clock on earth, because time itself moves
| differently.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| So I'm not an expert, but this behavior actually would
| behave differently in different gravity wells. Due to
| relativity, while you would observe a cesium clock working
| normally on the moon, your Earth buddy would disagree with
| your clock because the buddy would be down in a larger
| gravity well.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Sortof. It would behave the same to the observer sitting
| next to the atomic clock no matter their local frame of
| reference. The point though is that we have atomic clocks
| on both Earth and (soon) the Moon, so we need some sort
| of standard for coordinating between them.
| yencabulator wrote:
| That's the whole point, it does. Or, said differently, it
| behaves the same in whatever reference frame it's in, but
| observers in other reference frames can observe it being
| slower or faster.
|
| Here's an example with very elementary particles, muons:
|
| https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/University_Physics/
| B...
| cwkoss wrote:
| How significant is the time warp? Ex. how many moon-years are
| equivalent to 100 earth years?
| riffic wrote:
| correct me if I'm wrong but aren't relativistic differences due
| to velocity and not gravity differences?
| runarberg wrote:
| Both
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation
| chadlavi wrote:
| I truly do not see the point. Use UTC in space. Time is made up.
| No need to adapt it to whatever rock you happen to be standing
| on.
| RedNifre wrote:
| Did you read the article? The mass of the rock you happen to be
| standing on determines how fast time passes, so "UTC
| everywhere" would result in longer or shorter seconds depending
| on location.
| edf13 wrote:
| Atrocious back click hijacking on that site! (Safari iPhone)
| penny10k wrote:
| [dead]
| mabbo wrote:
| > There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster
| on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each
| day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking
| occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.
|
| As a programmer, I can feel a migraine coming on just _thinking_
| about the bugs this is going to cause.
| eternalban wrote:
| "Send your compute intensive code into orbit with us! We run
| faster"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Honestly, I hope we will do the obvious thing and adopt a
| "calendar second" that has a different size everywhere you go
| on the Solar System.
|
| The alternative is just crazy.
| mc32 wrote:
| Do they work with two time zones or time systems when you have a
| team on Earth and another Team on The Moon coordinating tasks? So
| the team on the Moon follows a Moon time zone and the team
| remaining on Earth follow a chosen Earth time zone and then they
| sync things up?
|
| What is the use case for teams using two time zones/systems or
| does the earthbound team use the Moon time zone and is that
| better than the team on the Moon following an Earth time zone?
| netgusto wrote:
| Sending good vibes to the engineers who will have to add Moon
| time support to the Java DateTime class.
| trollied wrote:
| This actually made me laugh out loud. Thank you :)
| [deleted]
| preisschild wrote:
| Can't wait for Martian Time support
|
| Then Java will have to support days longer than 24 hours.
| hawk_ wrote:
| Lunar days are longer than 24 hours (~29.5 earth days)
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Earth days are longer than 24 hours (when daylight-savings
| "falls back")
| josu wrote:
| Microsoft Excel will be the first to implement it.
|
| "That's a nice looking number you got there... wouldn't it be a
| shame if I were to convert it to MOON TIME!"
| spyremeown wrote:
| I'll send good vibes to that one guy from tzdata who'll for
| sure maintain a Lunar Time Zone database and literally everyone
| in the globe will rely upon it.
|
| edit: Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, you're The Dudes,
| dudes.
| AdamN wrote:
| [developer comes out of dark room with updates to DateTime] noW
| wE nEeD ThIS bACKpoRTEd tO JaVa 8!!! [developer spontaneously
| combusts]
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Would a small unit of lunar time be a Luna Tick?
| ragebol wrote:
| If there's ticks on the moon, we have bigger issues I suppose.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| _" Ticks...why'd it have to be ticks?"_
|
| I was hiking in Edgewood Park on the SF Peninsula, and when I
| got to my car and took off my hat, this big fat tick came
| running out. He must have been the size of a coffee bean, or
| it sure looked that way in my moment of fear.
|
| Is it true that they grow six times larger on the Moon?
| sph wrote:
| If it's true they can just blow up the Moon for all I care.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| And now we know the true explanation of the first
| paragraph of _Seveneves_ :
|
| _The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent
| reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The
| time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated
| A+0.0.0, or simply Zero._
| ragebol wrote:
| Wanted to add this to my list of books to read, only to
| find that of course 'Neal Stephenson' was already there.
|
| Thnx anyways
| hhjinks wrote:
| Yeah, like roaches on Mars.
| soneil wrote:
| This is actually where the term comes from, lat. lunaticus
| "moon-struck". So the pun is almost full-circle.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Hight time all those people living on the far side of the Moon
| get their own timezone.
| mdrzn wrote:
| EU talking about Lunar Time Zone while OmegaStar still doesn't
| support ISO timestamps.. smh.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I couldn't read it all before a paywall/ad thing popped up but I
| am interested in why.
|
| One reason you want the days to reflect the moons rotations
| around the earth somehow.
|
| Another is you want it to be the time at the moons centre of
| gravity for relativistic reasons.
| tanbog5 wrote:
| Are relativity effects significant on the moon? I thought a
| rationale for this was the need to account for relativistic
| effects making clocks run at slightly different speeds on the
| moon than on the surface of the earth.
|
| Is the "timezone" more of conversation protocol for earth time to
| moon time?
|
| Current missions use a synchronised mission clock and don't last
| long enough for this to be a big issue right?
| Beldin wrote:
| > _Are relativity effects significant on the moon?_
|
| Yes, as the article states, clocks run faster on the Moon.
| About 56 microseconds per day.
|
| Be that as it may, as far as I know, Newtonian gravity was
| sufficient for the moon landings. So I'm guessing this is more
| of a coordination issue between countries than a necessity for
| trajectories or such.
| fretn wrote:
| Forgive me my ignorance but does that mean that you age at a
| different speed at the moon compared to earth ?
| Zecc wrote:
| I've heard that due to time dilation time runs slower
| inside the Earth's core, enough to make it a couple of
| years younger than its surface.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Exactly. Look up the twin's paradox -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| You age at the same speed. Stuff that is far away from
| you may age more or less rapidly, but that effect only
| exists at the point where some kind of communication
| travels between you and the faraway stuff.
| soneil wrote:
| Technically yes - but the difference amounts to 2 seconds
| per century. Your lunar clone would be younger than you,
| but the difference would be less time than you spent
| calculating the difference.
| otikik wrote:
| Just use the timezone of the person who first discovered the
| Moon.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Can we call it "Stardate"? Please?
| gffrd wrote:
| > A joint international effort is now being launched towards
| achieving this
|
| Just pin it to GMT and call it good.
| cperciva wrote:
| I would go with TAI personally.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| They mean local lunar time, for coordination between actors on
| the moon. Lunar day length and even, due to gravity, second
| length differ from Earth (i.e., time moves at a different
| speed).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > They mean local lunar time, for coordination between actors
| on the moon. Lunar day length and even, due to gravity,
| second length differ from Earth (i.e., time moves at a
| different speed).
|
| These two sentences aren't related to each other. Time moves
| at a different speed on the moon than it does on Earth. But
| that only affects interactions between the Earth and the
| moon. Two actors that are both on the moon are both on the
| moon; their Earth-based clocks will work without adjustment
| if their goal is to coordinate with _each other_.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| That's basic physics, it surprises me some users seem to
| not understand how time works even on a forum like HN.
| jamesrom wrote:
| Doesn't sound like a compelling reason against UTC. Add a
| leap second every 50 years for relativity.
| midoridensha wrote:
| As the article noted, clocks lose 56us per day on the Moon,
| relative to the Earth.
| jamesrom wrote:
| So the moon gets a leap second every 50 years. Why does that
| prevent you from using UTC?
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| There is no Greenwich on the Moon!
| raisin_churn wrote:
| Name the first permanent moon settlement New Greenwich,
| problem solved.
| petesergeant wrote:
| If the EU won't bite the bullet and just adopt English as the
| official language, there's no way they're pinning this to
| Greenwich time
| brnt wrote:
| We should rename English to "European" while we're at it, or
| "Standard".
| petesergeant wrote:
| If you really want to annoy an English person, use an
| American flag to represent English-language localization
| pjc50 wrote:
| "English (Traditional) vs English (Simplified)"
|
| (joke explanation: this is a reference to the two Chinese
| writing systems, used in PRC and Taiwan)
| brnt wrote:
| en_US would actually be closer to English (Traditional)
| than en_UK, if linguists are to believe.
| brnt wrote:
| EUs English guidelines emphasized en_UK because that used
| to be the main audience to whom texts should be
| unambiguous. That requirement is no longer there, so
| en_EU (which defacto exists, although it has many
| variations) might now officially move closer to en_US,
| since that is what most cultural exposure is to for those
| to whom English is not a first language (i.e. almost
| everyone in the EU).
|
| I therefore propose a half EU/half US flag pictogram to
| refer to English from now on.
| [deleted]
| lostlogin wrote:
| Having English as the official language of the EU when
| England isn't in the EU would be quite funny.
| brnt wrote:
| How so? The US also uses English and not Lakota or some (or
| multiple) native American languages.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Ireland and Malta are two EU members where English is one
| of the official languages.
| riffraff wrote:
| But they picked Irish and Maltese ad their "EU must
| support it" language, since English was already there.
|
| When Brexit was looming there was a bit of a scare that
| when the UK was gone English would no longer be
| supported.
|
| But luckily the EU institutions were not insane.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Ireland would change their request if it comes to it,
| because practically nobody speaks Irish
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| this kind of thing doesn't happen immediately, English
| support gone in one generation would be more the thing.
| petesergeant wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, 93% of students in the EU currently
| learn it at school...
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's rather humbling how many languages are spoken by
| individuals there - and my experience is that people
| there often have other languages in common too.
| spleen wrote:
| Ireland and Malta are in the EU, both with English as the
| official language.
|
| This is along with the fact that English is lingua franca
| in EU and wider.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Ireland and Malta are in the EU, both with English as
| the official language
|
| It's a nitpick to be sure, but shouldn't it be " Ireland
| and Malta are in the EU, both with English as AN official
| language"
| petesergeant wrote:
| Sure, although English is absolutely the dominant
| language in almost all of the Republic of Ireland, where
| in Malta the situation is similar to the Netherlands,
| where most people it's just a very proficient second
| language.
| midoridensha wrote:
| What other language could the EU possibly use as a common
| language for communications between member states? English
| is the only language that you can use everywhere within the
| union and have a decent chance of being able to communicate
| with people (and this is true everywhere else in the world
| too).
| tossaway0 wrote:
| It'll finally be the year of the Esperanto lingua franca.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also known as "Paris mean time minus 9 minutes 21 seconds."
| andyferris wrote:
| I'm confused.
|
| English is an official EU language is one of the (few)
| working languages of the European Commission (French is also
| used a lot). And the United Kingdom remains a member of the
| European Space Agency. GMT overlaps with European time zones,
| with countries like France being big proponents things like
| UTC (and TAI, and the metric system in general).
| bb123 wrote:
| He's referring to the current animosity between the UK and
| Europe. Both groups frequently go out of their way to make
| life harder for the other. The EU proposing the English GMT
| would be unlikely in this climate. Also FWIW I think only
| Portugal overlaps with GMT.
| bloak wrote:
| Also Ireland, which is important because of Northern
| Ireland. It would be politically inconvenient if the time
| in Dublin were ever to be different from the time in
| London.
| xvilka wrote:
| What about interplanetary time? Solar time?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Time for metric time!
| [deleted]
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Just name the zones after the predominant facing constellations /
| star at the epoch of this new standard. 12 or 13 zones might be a
| good amount? Too many?
|
| This is perhaps the least political potential solution I could
| think of.
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| [flagged]
| esperent wrote:
| For some reason I thought this was going to be about an
| alternative to daylight savings time and any suggestion of
| abolishing that always gets my interest.
|
| It's not though, it's about giving the moon its own time zone.
| Which is about that least exciting moon based news I've ever
| heard although I'm sure there's interesting technical challenges
| (which I _sincerely_ hope I never have to deal with).
| latexr wrote:
| > For some reason I thought this was going to be about an
| alternative to daylight savings time
|
| I think I know the reason:
|
| > and any suggestion of abolishing that always gets my
| interest.
|
| When I read the title, I thought the same as you. It caught my
| interest because it sounded nonsensical so I was excited to see
| the reasoning and merits (or lack thereof) of the approach.
| luxcem wrote:
| > any suggestion of abolishing that always gets my interest.
|
| I recently learn about the Abolition of time zones[1]
| proposition too
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_time_zones
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I can't wait to have to take into consideration the timezone of
| the moon people when I schedule my zoom meetings in the future.
| /s
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Spare a thought for the future maintainers of liblunar.
| hulitu wrote:
| And more thoughts for the developers of liblunar1,
| liblunar2, liblunar3 and liblunar4 each a superset but
| incompatible with each other (see gtk). /s
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
| hcks wrote:
| Europe is tackling the important challenges as usual
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Accurate and coordinated time has been an important challenge
| since at least the 15th century
| brownkonas wrote:
| We wanted a moon base, but all we got was a lunar time zone.
| alex_young wrote:
| A zone of what though? Time zones, are zones of our planet where
| we observe time in some coordinated fashion. If we're adding the
| moon, what part of our globe should it be considered a part of?
| This all seems pretty silly.
| [deleted]
| doctor_eval wrote:
| It's not about creating an earth based zone for the moon. It's
| about creating a system of recording time that works on the
| moon. Time doesn't work the same on the moon as on earth, so
| why should they be linked?
|
| Earth clocks are basically about the position of a point on
| earth, relative to the sun. The moon's relationship with the
| sun is quite entirely different. So where is the equivalent of
| Greenwich on the moon? Does that even make sense? What is the
| equivalent of a day? Will there be weeks?
|
| Earth clocks and moon clocks don't run at the same time, due to
| relativity. And I guess the relationship between earth and moon
| time is far from linear depending on their relative positions
| and the sun's.
|
| So there is lots of interesting stuff to be worked out, and I
| don't think it's silly at all.
| brigandish wrote:
| > why should they be linked?
|
| Two reasons. Firstly, human biology, it'll be better for the
| people living/working there to experience via things like
| lighting and having visual clues from things like clocks to
| regulate their life.
|
| Secondly, for communication with those on Earth in a way that
| makes sense to _both_ parties. We only use our system of time
| because it is useful (daylight saving might be an exception
| to that;) so why bother with a more "correct" version of
| that on the Moon? It's not like you'll be using the days
| there if it's light for one Earth month and dark for another.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I would have thought that a local moon time would primarily
| be for the benefit of people on the moon.
|
| Obviously, if you're calling people on earth then you need
| to do a conversion anyway, just like we have to do when
| making international calls.
|
| But if you're on the moon, perhaps there is a better way of
| keeping time that will benefit others also on the moon.
| Daz1 wrote:
| Why needlessly complicate things? Use GMT + 0, earth days,
| and earth weeks. Why introduce all this unnecessary
| confusion? There is no practical need to measure local time
| on the moon.
|
| >Earth clocks and moon clocks don't run at the same time, due
| to relativity.
|
| I'm sure the 1/3000th of a millisecond per year won't be a
| problem
| doctor_eval wrote:
| > I'm sure the 1/3000th of a millisecond per year won't be
| a problem
|
| But that's several orders of magnitude incorrect. FTA:
|
| > Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining
| about 56 microseconds each day
|
| Unless my maths is wrong isn't it actually 200 milliseconds
| per year?
|
| It's not a lot of time, sure. But it seems important to
| people like scientists.
|
| Which, not coincidentally, is probably the most "practical"
| thing people will be doing while spending time on the moon.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Unless my maths is wrong isn't it actually 200
| milliseconds per year?
|
| 20, not 200.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yes, you are right. 0.02 seconds; I made a conversion
| error to ms.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > There is no practical need to measure local time on the
| moon
|
| Could it be useful to know when the sun would rise and set,
| or when Earth rises and sets, for the sake of having
| routines related to solar power or LOS communications?
| Having a Luna-native time-of-day might be handy for some
| things.
|
| I think it makes some sense to come to an agreement, even
| if that agreement was to use UTC (TFA does mention that
| it's used for ISS).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Could it be useful to know when the sun would rise and
| set, or when Earth rises and sets, for the sake of having
| routines related to solar power or LOS communications?
|
| The sun rises and sets over exactly one (Earth) lunar
| month, 29.5 days. That's what the phases of the moon are,
| the progression of sunlight over the face of the moon.
|
| Earth never rises or sets; the near side of the moon
| always faces toward Earth, and the far side of the moon
| never faces toward Earth. (This is known as
| "tidelocking".)
|
| So no, neither of those could be useful.
| jxf wrote:
| The title is slightly misleading -- strictly speaking, they
| aren't just giving the moon its own time "zone", they're giving
| it a reference time.
| patife wrote:
| what's the different exactly @jxf?
| jxf wrote:
| A reference time describes what standard of time we use. On
| Earth, for most human use cases, the reference time is UTC.
| UTC is measured by using International Atomic Time (TAI, from
| the French "temps atomique international") and adding or
| subtracting a prescribed number of leap seconds to account
| for the rotation of the Earth.
|
| We don't use TAI in everyday use because it's constantly and
| continuously changing in small ways to account for the tiny
| accelerations or decelerations in Earth's rotation, and
| that's annoying for computers. So instead we use UTC.
|
| A time zone is a different thing entirely. A time zone is a
| set of rules that describes how to convert from a reference
| time to a local time.
|
| Most people think of a time zone as being a fixed offset,
| like "I use Eastern Time; that means UTC-5". This is wrong. A
| time zone is a _set_ of offsets, each of which applies to a
| _range_ of reference times. For example, we have a time zone
| called "America/New York". This describes, for any current or
| future datetime in reference time, what the correct _local_
| time would be.
|
| Here the scientists are doing two things: deciding what the
| UTC equivalent for the Moon should be (the reference time)
| and deciding what (if any) offsets should be applied to
| compute "local" time somewhere on the Moon (the time zone).
| yencabulator wrote:
| > We don't use TAI in everyday use because it's constantly
| and continuously changing in small ways to account for the
| tiny accelerations or decelerations in Earth's rotation,
| and that's annoying for computers. So instead we use UTC.
|
| Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't
| change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged
| together. As monotonic as human kind is able to
| manufacture, at this time.
|
| UTC is TAI+varying offset in an effort to stay close to
| mean solar time.
|
| The varying offset of UTC, called leap seconds, is what's
| annoying to computers. If we ran computers on TAI, they
| would be simpler!
|
| And "data center time" tends to be something approximating
| UTC, with leap seconds smeared into continuous adjustments,
| just because UTC is annoying to computers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Mean_solar_time
| jxf wrote:
| > Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't
| change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged
| together. As monotonic as human kind is able to
| manufacture, at this time.
|
| That is not the complete story. The calculation used to
| average the clocks has changed over time, thus amending
| TAI. The "perfect monotonic" time you're talking about is
| TT (terrestrial time), not TAI.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Wikipedia about TT: "It is a theoretical ideal, and real
| clocks can only approximate it. [...] TT is indirectly
| the basis of UTC, via International Atomic Time (TAI)."
|
| So, TAI is what we are able to measure. TT is a
| theoretical construct. Can't run computers on TT, can run
| them on TAI.
| jxf wrote:
| Yes, I'm just saying that it's not accurate that "TAI
| doesn't change". It has notably and significantly changed
| a number of times.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| "Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56
| microseconds each day, the space agency said".
|
| I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this
| sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different
| clock technologies that work in different ways?
|
| Or are they saying this because there is only one "best"
| technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the
| moon?
| beeneuf wrote:
| It's not about the technology, atomic clocks are extremely
| accurate - it's time dilation due to relativity.
| phicoh wrote:
| No it is pesky Einstein guy with his general relativity.
|
| The bigger problem is that our timekeeping is earth based. The
| time definition should have been based on deep space, with
| corrections for time on earth.
|
| So earth clock are slow with respect to clocks in deep space.
| Clocks on the moon are less slow are therefore faster than on
| earth
| medstrom wrote:
| Not a physicist, but I was led to understand there is no
| universal frame of reference. You can't base time on deep
| space as if time was the same across all deep space, because
| it isn't. Right? A local time "correction" is easy when you
| compare against exactly one other point in space but if you
| want something like an universe-wide UTC that everyone can
| correct against, it can't be done. Although I don't really
| understand why.
| phicoh wrote:
| Not a physicist either, but one practical problem is the
| speed of light. Time synchronization is likely to become
| very tricky if you have communicate with time sources that
| are hundreds of light years away.
| marzipanWhale wrote:
| I assume this is due to time dilation, so it's not a limitation
| of the clocks.
| crote wrote:
| It's a physics thing which affects all clocks.
|
| According to special relativity clocks on the Moon will run
| _slower_ because the moon is orbiting the Earth, so the clock
| has a higher relative speed. However, general relativity says
| the clock will run _faster_ , because the Moon has a smaller
| gravitational field than Earth.
|
| In this case the second effect will dominate, so even a
| _perfect_ clock will run faster: it 's not the clock which is
| fast, it is _time itself_. GPS satellites have to deal with the
| same issue.
| px43 wrote:
| Do you think there are any physical phenomena that can be
| used that might be sensitive to relativistic effects?
| Something like a quartz crystal that actually vibrates at
| different speeds depending on how dilated the current
| reference frame is? Maybe something external, like if our sun
| would be emitting some sort of signal at a regular interval
| that everyone could sync up against.
|
| I wonder if, in the future, we will have a group of
| timekeeping satellites orbiting our sun. Maybe their orbit
| could be tweaked to have identical time dilation to Earth,
| and everyone can just sync off that.
|
| Maybe we can derive some time keeping mechanism from the
| black hole at the center of our galaxy, or maybe we will just
| realize that our obsession with timekeeping is a silly
| terrestrial habit, and not really important at scale.
| ajuc wrote:
| They should have written "time runs faster on the Moon than on
| Earth". Clocks just measure it. You can't solve this with a
| better clock :)
| Xylakant wrote:
| But you could fix it with a sufficiently heavy clock.
| ajuc wrote:
| It would change the Moon orbit too :)
| wunderland wrote:
| Any update on the EU's plan to abolish Daylight Saving Time here
| on earth? It seems Brexit and the pandemic stalled that effort
| completely.
| olivierduval wrote:
| I can understand that it's numerically simpler to start at 0h00
| but... don't we miss something related to the sun ????
|
| It seem to me that the "best" reference point would be "mid-day"
| (at 12:00), when the sun is perpendicular to the planet. It can
| be easily "guessed" and synced I think... like it has been for
| millenaries before the clocks
|
| So I guess that instead of 0h00:00-24h39:35 I would prefer
| -Oh:20:17 to 24:19:18 (centered on 12:00). Or we can just
| decorrelate "absolute time" (in h/m/s) and "time of day" (in %)
| where mi-day is 50% (actual duration in H/M/S to be depending on
| the planet) and mid-year is 50% of the actual rotation around the
| sun...
| paxys wrote:
| This is fine to do while we are still talking about space
| missions and quick landings, but the moment there is a base and
| people start to live there semi-permanently you won't be able to
| just pin it to UTC and call it a day.
|
| Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to
| additionally account for the moon would make people quit the
| profession.
| kube-system wrote:
| > you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day.
|
| Yeah you'd have to call it 29.5 days.
|
| But joking aside, people live on ISS and use UTC despite their
| 90 minute "days".
|
| What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and
| go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and
| isn't dependent on location.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| How about 1000 ".beats" per day? Swatch tried that, but it
| didn't catch on.
| kube-system wrote:
| A "day" is a terrible horrible no good very bad unit. Units
| should be constant!
|
| https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deviation_of_day_
| l...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| The deviation is a couple of milliseconds :)
|
| Bad for scientists, not noticeable for normal life.
| Science could have its own standard?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap
| and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment
| and isn't dependent on location.
|
| What do you do about relativistic effects which cause time to
| move at different rates in different places, including on the
| Moon. From TFA:
|
| > Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about
| 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further
| complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar
| surface than in lunar orbit.
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| How is that even possible? Does cesium have a different
| frequency there?
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I think the point is that the clock on the moon runs
| faster from the point of view of an observer on Earth due
| to time dilation. I can't claim to understand it, but
| clocks "run slower" the deeper they are in a gravity
| well. To an observer colocated with the clock, it ticks
| accurately.
|
| This isn't a new problem, though. GPS satellites have
| atomic clocks, and they drift 7uS or so per day due to
| time dilation.
| ssivark wrote:
| Yes -- relativistic effects are so fundamental that they
| affect _every_ system /process (including atomic clocks )
| and therefore _any_ measurement scheme. That's why we
| talk about "time slowing down". The movie Interstellar
| has one popular depiction of this.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Relativity, different gravity well. Cesium is the same,
| actual time is different.
| slow_typist wrote:
| It does. Not for the observer on the moon, but on the
| earth.
|
| Hafele-Keating experiment:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele-Keating_experiment
| paxys wrote:
| Because spacetime. Clocks run at different speeds
| depending on the gravitational field in which they
| operate. This is true for any two clocks, not just
| between earth and the moon. Satellites have to constantly
| correct their clocks for the same reason.
| ragebol wrote:
| Nope, those are relativistic effects. This dude called
| Einstein had a few things to say about it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity
|
| One of the effects in time dilation, where moving clocks
| are measured to tick more slowly than an observer's
| "stationary" clock.
| nme01 wrote:
| From earths perspective, yes.
|
| It's just that time really passes quicker on Moon (not
| just an illusion).
| [deleted]
| Beldin wrote:
| Lunar gravity is about 1/6th of Earth gravity. Clocks
| slow down due to gravity (Einstein's relativity). Thus,
| clocks tick faster if there's less gravity.
|
| Aside: we can measure this effect on Earth, between the
| foot and top of a mountain. Tom Scott has a video about
| exactly that.
| soneil wrote:
| The really weird part to get your head around here is
| that in case of relativistic differences, it's actually
| time that's changing. So cesium still has the same
| frequency, the same number of events per second, but
| their second is not the same as ours.
|
| When people talk about clocks running faster or slower,
| it muddies the topic a little because it makes it sound
| like a fault of the clock. The clock is accurately
| measuring the time it experiences.
|
| My favourite trivia on this topic is that this is not
| hypothetical. If the clocks on GPS satellites kept earth
| time (eg, without accounting for relativistic drift), the
| entire GPS system would accumulate 10km of error per day.
| This is a genuine thing with measurable, real-world
| effects.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| People living on the Moon will need artificial lighting since
| the days there are 29.5 Earth days.
|
| The real issue will be Mars since their days are approximately
| the same as Earth.
| 015a wrote:
| I think a more interesting argument is: Humans are 24-hour
| creatures (ok, maybe not precisely 24 hours, but close enough).
| That's how our internal clocks are wired. Its not nurture; its
| nature; and it would take generations living day-in day-out
| with a different cadence before we see biological adjustments.
|
| Sure, our clocks are 24-hours-a-day because that syncs up well
| with the rotation of the earth. That's the scientists'
| argument, and it isn't why we use a 24 hour clock. The real
| reason is because it syncs up well with our biology. Its hard
| to imagine a world where these two things aren't synced up, but
| we're headed to some soon, and its likely that any clock which
| doesn't sync up to our biology (TimeAwake + TimeAsleep = 1 Day
| = 86400 seconds) will be rejected by anyone who isn't ordered
| by their commanding officer to use it.
|
| Its like... just use UTC. Be done with it. The argument that
| "its an Earth Time, and we're Interplanetary now" feels like
| its coming from a sci-fi fan-fiction writer obsessed with The
| Expanse and solving problems before they exist. The most
| important priority for any timekeeping system is that its
| Useful. The second highest priority is that its Scientifically
| or Mathematically Beautiful, and this second priority is _so
| far_ below the first one that we invented timezones and
| daylight savings time and everyone who has ever had to think
| critically about either of these things wants to jump off a
| fucking bridge but we tolerate it because they 're Useful (and,
| we're getting rid of DST, because we've recognized that its Not
| So Useful, again, Usefulness drives everything).
|
| Here's what's going to happen: they'll invent some kind of new
| Lunar Time with 29.35 earth-day long days or some other
| nonsense. Every clock on the wall at Moonbase Alpha will have
| both Lunar Time and UTC and probably US Central Time because
| Houston & NASA. The scientists who invent it will pat
| themselves on the back. The janitors who clean the place will
| have their shifts scheduled in UTC hours and the Gregorian
| calendar ("yeah man I'm off at 8pm and I don't work again till
| Monday, yeah I guess it is weird that its been night outside
| for two weeks yet we still say 'monDAY', I don't know man I
| just work here same as you let's grab some drinks"). In 350
| years, the Martian Humans will declare independence and reject
| all forms of Timekeeping that Us Earthlings invented, including
| the one the ESA (hint: EUROPEAN space agency) tried to invent
| for them, because Politics. Can we just, I don't know, focus on
| GETTING to the moon first, before we start paying people to
| retrofit our microwaves with new clocks?
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Idk we're planning these missions in the near/immediate
| future, so we need standardized times for those immediately
| future missions. Everything else comes later.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > Having to additionally account for the moon would make people
| quit the profession.
|
| ...and it will make other engineers rich when they dive into
| the complexity, wrap a clean API around it, and start a
| lucrative time-as-a-service company.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| How about just picking a non-cyclical time? Just count the amount
| of seconds/milliseconds since 1 Jan 1970 where the duration of
| the second is synced to those on earth. Just have no official
| days/hours/years whatever, no leap seconds, no adjustments, no
| nothing. Those details can be filled in at will by whoever needs
| lunar time for daily use.
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