8 ms·

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.

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.

cyberpunk 4y ago
I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone just gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move.
- benj111 4y ago
  Yes but if you work the night shift you get shafted. And when the clocks go back in autumn you get the 40 minute period twice.
- cornholio 4y ago
  It's basically the same thing, but harder to achieve technically because many things assume clocks are moving all the time. For example timers and timeouts are frequently implemented as loops polling system time has reached a certain future value. Many things break or malfunction if a large number of things happen at the same time, for example logging, crons etc. Imagine investigating a cybersecurity event perpetrated in the gap and finding all file dates and logtimes as unreliable.
  - eru 4y ago
    Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth). Timezones are just for displaying to humans.
    - epse 4y ago
      Probably, but even Windows would break in this scenario. It interprets the hardware clock as being in local time and derives UTC from that (you can change that with a registry change, but it isn't very reliable in my experience)
      - Kwpolska 4y ago
        Keeping the clock in UTC is reliable on Windows 10/11. Windows will happily read and write to the clock in UTC, and things like NTP sync just work. Source: 2 years of heavy Windows 10/11 usage with that setting.
    - planede 4y ago
      They really should have been on TAI. I guess it doesn't matter now if we won't get any more leap seconds.
      - cornholio 4y ago
        It's worth noting that even atomic clocks run on Mars faster than on Earth, due to the different gravity. So you might expect say half of the 50 microsecond daily gain quoted in this article for the Moon, 10 miliseconds per year or a full second per century, more than enough to make you your spaceship completely miss its intended orbit. And martians will definitely want to run their own atomic clocks, making sync very problematic. So TAI is not the end all for what I expect to be a very complicated technical problem.
        eru 4y ago
        Not sure whether sync will be 'very problematic'. We already have that sort of sync happening today: when your computer is off, it runs a quartz watch. When you turn it on, it syncs via ntp. Some special boffins on Mars would run atomic clocks, and worry about synchronisation with earth. For the rest of the people running quartz clocks, they wouldn't even notice.
- ajuc 4y ago
  This breaks all computer games and also internet (I think?).
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    I have had to make my computer believe that I was in Japan to play certain videogames. There was also that fascinating time I had to roll back the calendar to use a crack for a Denuvo protected game.
  - toast0 4y ago
    IP doesn't have a requirement for clock synchronization. Certificate validation does need clock synchronization, but most of the time rough synchronization works; you only need precise synchronization if you present certiticates close to their not-before or not-after dates.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    And might make planes fall from the sky, rather like the problem with the F35 and international date line.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Cue sci-fi dystopia where the totalitarian Mars gov't gases (or somehow otherwise knocks out) everyone for 40 minutes while they search the place and haul off dissidents.
  - lb1lf 4y ago
    You definitely need to watch Dark City (if you haven't already!) The movie does a variation on this exact plot. Very well, even.
    - euroderf 4y ago
      Yes, have seen it. Yes, had the same thought. ("Great minds think alike.")
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  That's a cute SF idea, but would be awful to live under.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone just gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move. For anything legal, scientific, etc., dealing with time or speed (tracking experiments, wage and hour laws, etc.) you need to be able to track time during the clock pause, which will lead to adoption (by social convention, if nothing else) of a standard method of recording times within the pause, which leads to clocks that display in that format times during the pause. “All clocks stop for 40 minutes” is not a stable equilibrium.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  The Martian "timeslip" in Red Mars works exactly kind this, if I recall. I assume that's a reference to the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name.
claviola 4y ago
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?)
- jjk166 4y ago
  Way easier than changing the rotation speed of mars.
- cornholio 4y ago
  > and I'm sorry, but what does "naming months and seasons in Mars" have to do with this? Time of day and calendaring and discussed together because they allow you to ask things like "what was the date and time on Mars prime meridian on Feb 2 2023 6:00 UTC" and get a recognizable date and time back. It's essentially a timezone, albeit a very strange one with a variable offset. > modifying the core idea of the 24 hour day to be a "slight tweak"? Ok, maybe an exaggerated hand-wave on my part. It's a slight software tweak on my desk clock. I was contrasting with the alternative of modifying a fundamental SI unit and more or less rebuilding from scratch all hardware sent on Mars. The fuckups alone resulting from confusing Earth seconds with Mars seconds.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  You have basically three options for timekeeping on mars: adjust the day, adjust the second, or give up on days syncing with the (apparent) movement of the sun. The first option breaks mostly assumptions made in software and processes, the second mostly assumptions made in hardware, and the third breaks human's circadian rythm (a 23 or 25 hour rythm isn't a big deal, but it has to sync to light). Of those three, the things that rely on 24 hour days seem to be the easiest to change. Though there is precedent both to messing with the length of a day (a leap second makes the day one second longer, making 23:59:60 a valid time) and the length of a second (google pretends like seconds are slightly longer as an alternative way to deal with leap seconds)
  - claviola 4y ago
crote 4y ago
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.
- cornholio 4y ago
  > Wouldn't that get incredibly confusing with the calendar always being slightly off, despite using the same names? I think you can keep the calendar within +/- one day of a certain Earth location by carefully adjusting the length of the months. So it would be much like the dates vary on Earth between time zones, for example at the time I'm writing this the date in Hawaii is March 1st, while my local date is March 2nd. But less predictable, yes.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  People under 30 don't use the "circular clock" anyway. Mars will do fine without it.
  - jcla1 4y ago
    That is definitely not true - I have an analog wrist watch (and am under 30). Also, there can be benefits to the use of analog clocks: in some circumstances they're quicker to read the time off of. http://www.mcld.co.uk/blog/2006/digital-vs-analogue-clocks.html http://www.mcld.co.uk/blog/2006/digital-vs-analogue-clocks.h...
    - cornholio 4y ago
      Have your circular dial divided in 24.658 sections then. Nothing good can come from using a slightly longer second then what absolutely every piece of Earth hardware expects. Unless you are billion dollar rover mission where every bit or hardware is a custom design, it's imperative to use Earth seconds.
aqme28 4y ago
Mars explorer teams keep shifts in Mars time and have special Martian watches and alarm clocks. It sounds nice to me. Having an extra 40 minutes in a day seems about perfect.
skissane 4y ago
> 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.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > You could use something like the ISO 8601 week calendar – the year is divided into weeks. Note that ISO 8601 weeks can be non-intuitive: per the Gregorian calendar, December 30, 2019, was in 2019; but per ISO 8601, December 30 it was in Week 1 Year 2020. Tom Scott: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3jxx8Yyw1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3jxx8Yyw1c
- slim 4y ago
  Sensorwatch has a watch face with iso8601 weeknumber (which I did) https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/main/movement/watch_faces/clock/weeknumber_clock_face.c https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/main/movem...
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  Months are nice to have
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
N19PEDL2 4y ago
> 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.
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  Is the difference in quality of life so dramatic with a day wrapping on non-integer seconds when both proposals wrap at non-integer minutes and non-integer hours? The real question is why stop at miliseconds - it seems inconsequential. Go all the way down and assume that as the hour/minute/second granularity all proved insufficient in the past, the same way milliseconds would become insufficient one day. Make the period parameterizable (i.e. not a constant), with only the current value at 24 hours 39 minutes 35 seconds 244 milliseconds.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > This just because in my opinion it is easier to live with leap seconds than with non-integer seconds. That is not the opinion of a bunch of folks who want to get rid of the leap second on Earth: * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03783-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03783-5 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658541
  - N19PEDL2 4y ago
    But no one is proposing to have non-integer seconds as a solution to get rid of the leap seconds.
anonymous_sorry 4y ago
I would support the use of this on Earth as well. 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.
t0suj4 4y ago
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.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
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.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  Everyone says this but reality never seems to work out that way when push comes to shove. Will you be singing that tune when a religious minority you hate moves there, establishes a theocratic government, starts teaching women to read, hanging undesirables and troublemakers and regressing on pretty much every human right your ancestors died for, bonus points for starting a war with the locals. That said, in the historical example I'm referencing the state was too weak to do much about them from afar and they did clean itself up after subsequent immigration diluted their culture over the following 100yr. God what a bunch of assholes they were in the meantime though...
  - tdba 4y ago
    You are of course talking about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      I was thinking the English settlement of eastern Massachusetts and the Connecticut river valley but I guess that works too.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    I refuse to get involved in Martian politics. You can CIA them however you want though. I'm sure you can find just as many instances where foreign meddling and infantilization of people had disastrous consequences. You'll be happy to know that you can appreciate their input on Earth matters as much as they'll appreciate yours on martian matters.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
poulpy123 4y ago
Since there is no and will never be any people on mars for more than few months, there is no point of having a special time beside UTC
- cornholio 4y ago
  Even for those few months, there is overwhelming reason to link the circadian rhythm of the mission with the solar martian day, see the rover missions; a drifting UTC mission time with no intuitive mapping of days to sols immediately raises massive logistic problems and human error risks.
jjkeddo199 4y ago
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%
hn8305823 4y ago
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.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > 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. If a contract say "the payment must be received before March 1, 2123", then you have to worry about time syncing between the planets. How fast are fund transfers between planets?
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > If a contract say "the payment must be received before March 1, 2123" Then the contract is incompletely specified. March 1, 2123 according to whose time?

cyberpunk 4y ago

I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone just gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move.

benj111 4y ago
Yes but if you work the night shift you get shafted. And when the clocks go back in autumn you get the 40 minute period twice.
cornholio 4y ago
It's basically the same thing, but harder to achieve technically because many things assume clocks are moving all the time. For example timers and timeouts are frequently implemented as loops polling system time has reached a certain future value. Many things break or malfunction if a large number of things happen at the same time, for example logging, crons etc. Imagine investigating a cybersecurity event perpetrated in the gap and finding all file dates and logtimes as unreliable.
- eru 4y ago
  Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth). Timezones are just for displaying to humans.
  - epse 4y ago
    Probably, but even Windows would break in this scenario. It interprets the hardware clock as being in local time and derives UTC from that (you can change that with a registry change, but it isn't very reliable in my experience)
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      Keeping the clock in UTC is reliable on Windows 10/11. Windows will happily read and write to the clock in UTC, and things like NTP sync just work. Source: 2 years of heavy Windows 10/11 usage with that setting.
  - planede 4y ago
    They really should have been on TAI. I guess it doesn't matter now if we won't get any more leap seconds.
    - cornholio 4y ago
      It's worth noting that even atomic clocks run on Mars faster than on Earth, due to the different gravity. So you might expect say half of the 50 microsecond daily gain quoted in this article for the Moon, 10 miliseconds per year or a full second per century, more than enough to make you your spaceship completely miss its intended orbit. And martians will definitely want to run their own atomic clocks, making sync very problematic. So TAI is not the end all for what I expect to be a very complicated technical problem.
      - eru 4y ago
        Not sure whether sync will be 'very problematic'. We already have that sort of sync happening today: when your computer is off, it runs a quartz watch. When you turn it on, it syncs via ntp. Some special boffins on Mars would run atomic clocks, and worry about synchronisation with earth. For the rest of the people running quartz clocks, they wouldn't even notice.
ajuc 4y ago
This breaks all computer games and also internet (I think?).
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  I have had to make my computer believe that I was in Japan to play certain videogames. There was also that fascinating time I had to roll back the calendar to use a crack for a Denuvo protected game.
- toast0 4y ago
  IP doesn't have a requirement for clock synchronization. Certificate validation does need clock synchronization, but most of the time rough synchronization works; you only need precise synchronization if you present certiticates close to their not-before or not-after dates.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  And might make planes fall from the sky, rather like the problem with the F35 and international date line.
euroderf 4y ago
Cue sci-fi dystopia where the totalitarian Mars gov't gases (or somehow otherwise knocks out) everyone for 40 minutes while they search the place and haul off dissidents.
- lb1lf 4y ago
  You definitely need to watch Dark City (if you haven't already!) The movie does a variation on this exact plot. Very well, even.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Yes, have seen it. Yes, had the same thought. ("Great minds think alike.")
BurningFrog 4y ago
That's a cute SF idea, but would be awful to live under.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone just gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move. For anything legal, scientific, etc., dealing with time or speed (tracking experiments, wage and hour laws, etc.) you need to be able to track time during the clock pause, which will lead to adoption (by social convention, if nothing else) of a standard method of recording times within the pause, which leads to clocks that display in that format times during the pause. “All clocks stop for 40 minutes” is not a stable equilibrium.
Oxidation 4y ago
The Martian "timeslip" in Red Mars works exactly kind this, if I recall. I assume that's a reference to the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name.

claviola 4y ago

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?)

jjk166 4y ago
Way easier than changing the rotation speed of mars.
cornholio 4y ago
> and I'm sorry, but what does "naming months and seasons in Mars" have to do with this? Time of day and calendaring and discussed together because they allow you to ask things like "what was the date and time on Mars prime meridian on Feb 2 2023 6:00 UTC" and get a recognizable date and time back. It's essentially a timezone, albeit a very strange one with a variable offset. > modifying the core idea of the 24 hour day to be a "slight tweak"? Ok, maybe an exaggerated hand-wave on my part. It's a slight software tweak on my desk clock. I was contrasting with the alternative of modifying a fundamental SI unit and more or less rebuilding from scratch all hardware sent on Mars. The fuckups alone resulting from confusing Earth seconds with Mars seconds.
wongarsu 4y ago
You have basically three options for timekeeping on mars: adjust the day, adjust the second, or give up on days syncing with the (apparent) movement of the sun. The first option breaks mostly assumptions made in software and processes, the second mostly assumptions made in hardware, and the third breaks human's circadian rythm (a 23 or 25 hour rythm isn't a big deal, but it has to sync to light). Of those three, the things that rely on 24 hour days seem to be the easiest to change. Though there is precedent both to messing with the length of a day (a leap second makes the day one second longer, making 23:59:60 a valid time) and the length of a second (google pretends like seconds are slightly longer as an alternative way to deal with leap seconds)
- claviola 4y ago

crote 4y ago

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.

cornholio 4y ago
> Wouldn't that get incredibly confusing with the calendar always being slightly off, despite using the same names? I think you can keep the calendar within +/- one day of a certain Earth location by carefully adjusting the length of the months. So it would be much like the dates vary on Earth between time zones, for example at the time I'm writing this the date in Hawaii is March 1st, while my local date is March 2nd. But less predictable, yes.
BurningFrog 4y ago
People under 30 don't use the "circular clock" anyway. Mars will do fine without it.
- jcla1 4y ago
  That is definitely not true - I have an analog wrist watch (and am under 30). Also, there can be benefits to the use of analog clocks: in some circumstances they're quicker to read the time off of. http://www.mcld.co.uk/blog/2006/digital-vs-analogue-clocks.html http://www.mcld.co.uk/blog/2006/digital-vs-analogue-clocks.h...
  - cornholio 4y ago
    Have your circular dial divided in 24.658 sections then. Nothing good can come from using a slightly longer second then what absolutely every piece of Earth hardware expects. Unless you are billion dollar rover mission where every bit or hardware is a custom design, it's imperative to use Earth seconds.

aqme28 4y ago

Mars explorer teams keep shifts in Mars time and have special Martian watches and alarm clocks. It sounds nice to me. Having an extra 40 minutes in a day seems about perfect.

skissane 4y ago

> 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.

throw0101c 4y ago
> You could use something like the ISO 8601 week calendar – the year is divided into weeks. Note that ISO 8601 weeks can be non-intuitive: per the Gregorian calendar, December 30, 2019, was in 2019; but per ISO 8601, December 30 it was in Week 1 Year 2020. Tom Scott: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3jxx8Yyw1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3jxx8Yyw1c
slim 4y ago
Sensorwatch has a watch face with iso8601 weeknumber (which I did) https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/main/movement/watch_faces/clock/weeknumber_clock_face.c https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/main/movem...
shepherdjerred 4y ago
Months are nice to have

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

N19PEDL2 4y ago

> 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.

kubanczyk 4y ago
Is the difference in quality of life so dramatic with a day wrapping on non-integer seconds when both proposals wrap at non-integer minutes and non-integer hours? The real question is why stop at miliseconds - it seems inconsequential. Go all the way down and assume that as the hour/minute/second granularity all proved insufficient in the past, the same way milliseconds would become insufficient one day. Make the period parameterizable (i.e. not a constant), with only the current value at 24 hours 39 minutes 35 seconds 244 milliseconds.
throw0101a 4y ago
> This just because in my opinion it is easier to live with leap seconds than with non-integer seconds. That is not the opinion of a bunch of folks who want to get rid of the leap second on Earth: * https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03783-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03783-5 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658541
- N19PEDL2 4y ago
  But no one is proposing to have non-integer seconds as a solution to get rid of the leap seconds.

anonymous_sorry 4y ago

I would support the use of this on Earth as well. 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.

t0suj4 4y ago

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.

kelseyfrog 4y ago

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.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
Everyone says this but reality never seems to work out that way when push comes to shove. Will you be singing that tune when a religious minority you hate moves there, establishes a theocratic government, starts teaching women to read, hanging undesirables and troublemakers and regressing on pretty much every human right your ancestors died for, bonus points for starting a war with the locals. That said, in the historical example I'm referencing the state was too weak to do much about them from afar and they did clean itself up after subsequent immigration diluted their culture over the following 100yr. God what a bunch of assholes they were in the meantime though...
- tdba 4y ago
  You are of course talking about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    I was thinking the English settlement of eastern Massachusetts and the Connecticut river valley but I guess that works too.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I refuse to get involved in Martian politics. You can CIA them however you want though. I'm sure you can find just as many instances where foreign meddling and infantilization of people had disastrous consequences. You'll be happy to know that you can appreciate their input on Earth matters as much as they'll appreciate yours on martian matters.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

poulpy123 4y ago

Since there is no and will never be any people on mars for more than few months, there is no point of having a special time beside UTC

cornholio 4y ago
Even for those few months, there is overwhelming reason to link the circadian rhythm of the mission with the solar martian day, see the rover missions; a drifting UTC mission time with no intuitive mapping of days to sols immediately raises massive logistic problems and human error risks.

jjkeddo199 4y ago

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%

hn8305823 4y ago

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.

throw0101a 4y ago
> 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. If a contract say "the payment must be received before March 1, 2123", then you have to worry about time syncing between the planets. How fast are fund transfers between planets?
- pdonis 4y ago
  > If a contract say "the payment must be received before March 1, 2123" Then the contract is incompletely specified. March 1, 2123 according to whose time?