4 ms·
The issue is that all timekeeping is going to be an approximation of our messy Solar System. The only question is, "How accurate is accurate enough?" Currentl
by btilly 4y ago
The issue is that all timekeeping is going to be an approximation of our messy Solar System. The only question is, "How accurate is accurate enough?"
Currently our calendar goes off by one day in 3236 years. If the history is calendars is indicative, in about 10,000 more years we may change our calendar. (Or, being multi-planetary by then, maybe we'll consider it a quaint relic of our origin.)
Our clocks predict astronomical time of day to less than a minute for a human lifetime. And both DST and timezones demonstrate that we're happy to live with the clock and Sun disagreeing by an hour or more.
My position is that both are currently good enough for the next couple of thousand years. And we can let our distant descendants sort it out when the time comes.
- ilammy 4y ago> (Or, being multi-planetary by then, maybe we'll consider it a quaint relic of our origin.) It’s more likely that every planet will have its own calendar and you’d have to do the conversions and translations. That’s what scientists do with Mars time. Thanks to relativity, time at point A is not the same as time at point B, and whether they stay in sync for you depends on how you get from A to B.
- btilly 4y agoThe calendar point is possible. But the special relativity point, not so much. While "now" can vary according to the time it takes to get from A to B, all observers can work out what "now is according to the reference frame of the distant stars". On a mere interplanetary scale, this idea is amazingly precise. We might not agree on how much time passed (this has already mattered for GPS satellites), but for all practical purposes "now" is perfectly meaningful.
- ilammy 4y agoYeah, looks like it would work out fine. Since synchronous communication breaks down pretty quickly even on merely interplanetary levels, the remaining use for calendars and timekeeping is basically event planning. For that difference in reference points and interval duration is not that important, as long as you can compensate for that, making events happen at a time you expect in a place you expect. We're doing that fine already, communicating with our deep space probes.