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I know this is probably an April Fool's joke, but I'd be thrilled if this was real.
by yellowapple 6y ago
I know this is probably an April Fool's joke, but I'd be thrilled if this was real.
- BuildTheRobots 6y agoI'm almost certain it's a joke, the question is for how much longer? The crypto interoperability issues are amusing, thiugh I do seriously wonder how you deal with anything from a 10 to 40 minute round trip time.
- ronsor 6y agoYou have caching servers and set really, really long timeouts.
- wongarsu 6y agoThe same way we deal with speed-of-light delay on earth: CDNs, asynchronous protocols like email, or just ignoring it when we can get away with it (e.g. "instant" messaging). SSH might be a bit tricky, but just pretend your system on mars is a production server and send it a tested bash file (using any of your favorite automation tools).
- BenjiWiebe 6y agoWhat protocol do you use to securely send the bash file?
- livueta 6y agoSomething that doesn't rely on round trips for error correction, I guess. AFAIK bandwidth is limited but is overall less of an extreme constraint than the RTT. Seems like a good use for forward error correction / sending parity data, like Reed-Solomon.
- karmanyaahm 6y agoNot exactly a protocol but interesting to read https://public.ccsds.org/default.aspx https://public.ccsds.org/default.aspx
- vsareto 6y agoWriting some test software based on Martian time might be a good way to prevent some DateTime issues when we do start living there.
- korethr 6y agoThe best April Fools jokes are the ones with enough plausibility that they _could_ be real.
- jamal-kumar 6y agoImagine reading: "DANGER: ABI incompatibility. Updating to this kernel requires extra work or you won't be able to login: install a snapshot instead" and raging
- Fern_Blossom 6y agoSame here, this is so far the best one yet. Far better than VW's shitty attempt. Though, it dawned on me, Mars could have real time zones. Not the stupid political mess we have today. Perfect, logical longitudinal time zones from the get go. That right there is more than enough reason for me to leave this planet. But let's be honest, Mars will be colonized, politics will arise and the same fuckery will happen eventually.
- elygre 6y agoIf they are zones, how can they be perfect? The middle might be, but anywhere else will be imperfect.
- yellowapple 6y agoYou're right. We need to constantly adjust our clocks depending on exact longitude.
- midasuni 6y agoAnd velocity. And altitude.
- monocasa 6y agoBetter yet, no time zones. Just one clock for the planet.
- jakear 6y agoObligatory https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- monocasa 6y agoWhen you're already destroying enough of the legacy timekeeping systems by switching to a planet without a 24 hour day, most of those arguments lack muster. Also, don't call people out of the blue and expect them to pick up anyway. Maybe your uncle had to work late and is sleeping even though the sun is technically out.
- Zenst 6y agoIt certainly does raise a forward thinking issue and that is networking across planets and TZ handling. TZ's are already a PITA what with leap seconds. Then there is defining standards on Mars, 24hour days kinda not going to translate, so again, more forward thinking needed. As for Mars GPS, bit of a way off, but I'm sure the good old atomic clocks will work. I guess the job title of "Systems Engineer of Time" may become a reality one day after all.
- seiferteric 6y agoKind of makes me wonder about local time on a space ship going some significant % of the speed of light. Time itself would be at a different rate than back home. Perhaps we need to introduce the concept of a space-time zone.
- wongarsu 6y agoThe most practical solution is probably to introduce a global time beacon, like a satellite broadcasting it's own time, or everyone counting the flashes of some known pulsar. Then you have one time reference everyone agrees on, it just ticks at different speeds depending on how fast you are moving. Luckily so far the practical propulsion concepts we have max out around 10% the speed of light for reasonable amounts of propellant, so we have a couple decades left to figure this out.
- zokier 6y agoWe have few time standards that already take relativity into account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Coordinate_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Coordinate_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_Coordinate_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_Coordinate_Time
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nwallin 6y agoA time system useful on Mars needs additional consideration; considerations we haven't given it yet. It requires more thinking than just time zones. The various things we've sent to Mars haven't had any need for a colloquially time; they're computers, they just know that 21,872 seconds or whatever into the day is that far into an 87,755 second day and that's good enough to calculate shadow angles and expected solar panel efficiency from. If we were to build a colony on Mars with normal people doing normal everyday things, we need something more than that. The first question we want to ask ourselves is, do we want to keep the SI defined second? If we don't care, then we have free reign to do whatever we want. We can define a Mars second to be 1/86,400th of a Mars day, and keep the 24 hour, 60 minute, 60 second time system we use on Earth. Or we switch to a metric time system, with a 10 hour day, 100 minute hours, 100 second minutes. Or a 1 day long day, and deci, ceni, milli, micro days. Or whatever. If we want to keep SI compatibility, we need to keep the second. The Martian solar day is 87,755.224 seconds long. 87,755 factors into 5^2 * 53 * 67. So we can do 25 hours per day, 53 minutes per hour, 67 seconds per minute to give an 87,755 second day. Unfortunately there would need to be a leap second once every 4-5 days. Then there's the question of the calendar. Perhaps fortunately, this gives us the opportunity to restart from scratch, because the calendar we use is such a goddamned clusterfuck, even worse than our time system. Unfortunately, the number of days in a Martian year (668 and change) does not lend itself to a clean division into tidy periods. You could have 23 months of 29 days each, with each month having 4 7 day weeks plus one holiday. This will give you a 667 day year. Add another annual holiday at the beginning of the year, plus an optional leap-holiday in the middle of the year. Or you could split it up into 37 months of 3 weeks, each with 6 days. This gives you a 666 day year, so sprinkle in 2-3 bonus holidays per year. There are a lot of considerations. It needs to be given more thought. Hopefully more thought than we've given to Earth's timekeeping systems.