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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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%
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
"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?
> 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.
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
```
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...
[+] [-] cornholio|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skissane|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kelseyfrog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberpunk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] N19PEDL2|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] claviola|3 years ago|reply
(and I'm sorry, but what does "naming months and seasons in Mars" have to do with this?)
[+] [-] hn8305823|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aqme28|3 years ago|reply
It sounds nice to me. Having an extra 40 minutes in a day seems about perfect.
[+] [-] crote|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anonymous_sorry|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jjkeddo199|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] poulpy123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0suj4|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] esperent|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] netgusto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josu|3 years ago|reply
"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|3 years ago|reply
edit: Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, you're The Dudes, dudes.
[+] [-] preisschild|3 years ago|reply
Then Java will have to support days longer than 24 hours.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lolinder|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] cwkoss|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yencabulator|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] alex_suzuki|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ragebol|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downvotetruth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rascul|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.
[+] [-] kube-system|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 015a|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] OscarCunningham|3 years ago|reply
The real issue will be Mars since their days are approximately the same as Earth.
[+] [-] q7xvh97o2pDhNrh|3 years ago|reply
...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.
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
As a programmer, I can feel a migraine coming on just thinking about the bugs this is going to cause.
[+] [-] eternalban|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|3 years ago|reply
The alternative is just crazy.
[+] [-] retube|3 years ago|reply
Is this a relativity effect from lower gravity?
[+] [-] jjkeddo199|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] olivierduval|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] hcks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] was_a_dev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownkonas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] edf13|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdrzn|3 years ago|reply