3 ms·

> How important are the seasons going to be for people who have to spend the vast majority of their time indoors due to the lack of a breathable atmosphere – an

by elihu 6y ago

> How important are the seasons going to be for people who have to spend the vast majority of their time indoors due to the lack of a breathable atmosphere – and possibly even underground for protection against radiation? Quite important, actually. Day and night cycles determine when solar power is available. You'll probably have some outdoor activity by humans (mining, construction, maintenance, etc...) that would be affected by daylight. (Perhaps most work will actually be done at night to avoid radiation from the sun?) And even in a hardened habitat you might have skylights (maybe long tubes or solar collectors connected to fiber optic cables rather than big windows in the ceiling). > The fact is that modern societies don't really need a calendar synchronised to the seasons. Most jobs nowadays the seasons are not very important. I work an indoor job, but still the seasons affect me quite a lot. (It's cold and rainy in the winter.) I don't know what the seasons are like on Mars, but I could imagine outdoor seasonal differences in temperature and light levels could have some impact on colony logistics. > For the first few decades at the very least, Martian colonies will be dealing with Earth an awful lot. Sure, but if the lead time between ordering a part and receiving delivery is something like six months or a year, it's probably hard to care that much about what's going on on Earth in real time. Sort of like someone who runs a business that buys parts from vendors in China is probably aware of the Chinese New Year. But that doesn't mean they run their life primarily off of the traditional Chinese calendar. > I don't know why you'd do that. On earth, clocks run from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 each day. On Mars, you'd just make them run to 24:39:34 instead. Well, sure, that's the practical solution. But it's less poetic than having some interval every day where the accounting of time is put on hold.

skissane 6y ago
> I could imagine outdoor seasonal differences in temperature and light levels could have some impact on colony logistics The question is whether that's important enough to justify using as the primary calendar for everyday use. You can always have a "Mars seasons" app which displays current and future Mars seasonal information in terms of the Earth calendar, or in terms of some kind of hybrid Earth-Mars calendar (like my suggestion of using Mars sols but Earth years.)
- elihu 6y ago
  I don't know how much the seasons would matter to a Martian colonist, but if you're on a planet lit by a day/night cycle that's approximately 24 hours, then you're most likely going to synchronize your sleep schedule to that, not the day/night cycle of some other planet you're not actually living on. That would be your day. And then from there the days and months get out of phase with Earth so you'd end up using your own calendar as well, at least for accounting days of the month. Using Earth months and years might be fine, though, as long as one accepts that the months are a few days shorter and so on; that seems reasonable. And "years" being a very specific chronological length are so well ingrained that you'd almost need to invent a new word for Mars years.
  - skissane 6y ago
    I personally think the most likely outcome is a hybrid calendar which combines the Martian sol, a 7-sol week, and the Earth year of approximately 355 sols. They might declare the the year to begin at the midnight Mars Coordinated Time which is closest to midnight UTC on 1 January on Earth. I don't know what they'd do about months. I reckon the easiest thing to do them would be just not to use them, and use a week count instead. A lot of businesses on earth prefer to use week counts instead of months for planning anyway, so we already know that approach works. For medium-term planning, you can divide the sol-weeks of the Earth year into four quarters. (The Earth-year contains 50-51 sol-weeks, so that divides into quarters of 12-13 sol-weeks–some quarters would be 7 sols longer than others.)
    - restalis 6y ago
      We have months because there is a big celestial body close to our planet that helped humans track long-scale time since before any formalized time system, so we had to fit it in, but on Mars? Even though there are Phobos & Deimos (which orbit too fast for any similar long-scale time tracking practical purpose), how visible are they to a martian surface observer with unaided aye? I guess that indeed there probably won't be anything, or at least not something local for that time-scale.

by elihu 6y ago

skissane 6y ago

> I could imagine outdoor seasonal differences in temperature and light levels could have some impact on colony logistics The question is whether that's important enough to justify using as the primary calendar for everyday use. You can always have a "Mars seasons" app which displays current and future Mars seasonal information in terms of the Earth calendar, or in terms of some kind of hybrid Earth-Mars calendar (like my suggestion of using Mars sols but Earth years.)

elihu 6y ago
I don't know how much the seasons would matter to a Martian colonist, but if you're on a planet lit by a day/night cycle that's approximately 24 hours, then you're most likely going to synchronize your sleep schedule to that, not the day/night cycle of some other planet you're not actually living on. That would be your day. And then from there the days and months get out of phase with Earth so you'd end up using your own calendar as well, at least for accounting days of the month. Using Earth months and years might be fine, though, as long as one accepts that the months are a few days shorter and so on; that seems reasonable. And "years" being a very specific chronological length are so well ingrained that you'd almost need to invent a new word for Mars years.
- skissane 6y ago
  I personally think the most likely outcome is a hybrid calendar which combines the Martian sol, a 7-sol week, and the Earth year of approximately 355 sols. They might declare the the year to begin at the midnight Mars Coordinated Time which is closest to midnight UTC on 1 January on Earth. I don't know what they'd do about months. I reckon the easiest thing to do them would be just not to use them, and use a week count instead. A lot of businesses on earth prefer to use week counts instead of months for planning anyway, so we already know that approach works. For medium-term planning, you can divide the sol-weeks of the Earth year into four quarters. (The Earth-year contains 50-51 sol-weeks, so that divides into quarters of 12-13 sol-weeks–some quarters would be 7 sols longer than others.)
  - restalis 6y ago
    We have months because there is a big celestial body close to our planet that helped humans track long-scale time since before any formalized time system, so we had to fit it in, but on Mars? Even though there are Phobos & Deimos (which orbit too fast for any similar long-scale time tracking practical purpose), how visible are they to a martian surface observer with unaided aye? I guess that indeed there probably won't be anything, or at least not something local for that time-scale.