5 ms·

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

by 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 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.