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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the EU won’t bite the bullet and just adopt English as the official language, there’s no way they’re pinning this to Greenwich time

Having English as the official language of the EU when England isn’t in the EU would be quite funny.

Ireland and Malta are in the EU, both with English as the official language.

This is along with the fact that English is lingua franca in EU and wider.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#22
post #2

> A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this Just pin it to GMT and call it good.

They mean local lunar time, for coordination between actors on the moon. Lunar day length and even, due to gravity, second length differ from Earth (i.e., time moves at a different speed).

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#24
post #6

This is fine to do while we are still talking about space missions and quick landings, but the moment there is a base and people start to live there semi-permanently you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day. Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.

> you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day. Yeah you’d have to call it 29.5 days. But joking aside, people live on ISS and use UTC despite their 90 minute “days”. What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and isn’t dependent on location.

> What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and isn’t dependent on location.

What do you do about relativistic effects which cause time to move at different rates in different places, including on the Moon. From TFA:

> Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#25
post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

Do you work with people in other timezones? It’s much easier to reason about what a reasonable time is for people when you know how it centers up with noon for them.

I do. And the math needs to be done either way, if you're trying to determine a relation to when the sun is at its peak for your area vs their area.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#26
post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

Do you work with people in other timezones? It’s much easier to reason about what a reasonable time is for people when you know how it centers up with noon for them.

'I'll call you tomorrow.'

'Tomorrow clock time or tomorrow after the Sun rises?'

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#27
Are relativity effects significant on the moon? I thought a rationale for this was the need to account for relativistic effects making clocks run at slightly different speeds on the moon than on the surface of the earth.

Is the "timezone" more of conversation protocol for earth time to moon time?

Current missions use a synchronised mission clock and don't last long enough for this to be a big issue right?

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#28
post #6

This is fine to do while we are still talking about space missions and quick landings, but the moment there is a base and people start to live there semi-permanently you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day. Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.

> Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.

...and it will make other engineers rich when they dive into the complexity, wrap a clean API around it, and start a lucrative time-as-a-service company.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day. Yeah you’d have to call it 29.5 days. But joking aside, people live on ISS and use UTC despite their 90 minute “days”. What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and isn’t dependent on location.

> What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and isn’t dependent on location. What do you do about relativistic effects which cause time to move at different rates in different places, including on the Moon. From TFA: > Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicati…

How is that even possible? Does cesium have a different frequency there?
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