101–110 of 406 posts
> A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this Just pin it to GMT and call it good.
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
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Why needlessly complicate things? Use GMT + 0, earth days, and earth weeks. Why introduce all this unnecessary confusion? There is no practical need to measure local time on the moon. >Earth clocks and moon clocks don’t run at the same time, due to relativity. I'm sure the 1/3000th of a millisecond per year won't be a problem
> There is no practical need to measure local time on the moon Could it be useful to know when the sun would rise and set, or when Earth rises and sets, for the sake of having routines related to solar power or LOS communications? Having a Luna-native time-of-day might be handy for some things. I think it makes some sense to come to an agreement, even if that agreement was to use UTC (TFA does mention that it's used…
The sun rises and sets over exactly one (Earth) lunar month, 29.5 days. That's what the phases of the moon are, the progression of sunlight over the face of the moon.
Earth never rises or sets; the near side of the moon always faces toward Earth, and the far side of the moon never faces toward Earth. (This is known as "tidelocking".)
So no, neither of those could be useful.
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> 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?
This isn't a new problem, though. GPS satellites have atomic clocks, and they drift 7uS or so per day due to time dilation.
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Forgive me my ignorance but does that mean that you age at a different speed at the moon compared to earth ?
Exactly. Look up the twin‘s paradox - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
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 mean replace conventional wall clocks with 24 hour versions, all set to UTC? I object on the grounds we could no longer say it's five o'clock somewhere in the world when we open a bottle in the daytime.
Still think life would be simpler if we all just adopted .beats (Swatch Internet Time): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Then it just kinda fizzled out. I'm still upset it didn't take off.
I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.
With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…
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With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…
Wow, there's clearly pros and cons for both! It's all about compromise and the way it currently works, works for the majority of people that don't even experience the downsides in their day to day life. Like having to coordinate meetings around the world or figuring out what time it is for their friend on the other side of the world. Most people never deal with any of that. They just want it to be 12:00 and bright ou…
Suppose we set the universal time to the current -12h meridian. Everyone works with that exact same time. If I receive a scheduled meeting at 15.00 I know exactly when to be there (wow, that's late for me!). If glance at the clock and see that it is 4.00, I know it's time for my afternoon tea, and that the sun is still out.
I think people would get used to this line of thinking very rapidly, and would scheduling would be arguably made easier, because the proposed time would not need to be parsed by anyone.
I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.
With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…
> Without timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. ... What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?
You aren't doing a fair comparison. In your "with timezones" example, you are considering it trivial to look up/remember what timezone Germany is in, but in your "without timezones" example, you are making it out to be more difficult to look up/remember what the "day-hours" of Germany would be.
In a world without timezones, you could just Google "what are they day hours in Germany" just like you can Google "what is the timezone in Germany" now. And in fact, it would be much easier to reason about - if you know that the time is currently 10:00, and the day starts at 18:00 in Germany, then you don't need to do any more math, you can just wait until it's after 18:00 to call her.
> If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
Again, you're assuming that language would not be different in a world without timezones. It's a completely unrealistic scenario, language always evolves to fit our real needs.
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With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…
The takeaway is that we, humans, tend to reference things in non-universal frames of reference. Be it "morning" for time or "office" for location. Timezones can be seen as an emergent property of long-distance communication. Whatever the algorithm you choose the underlying problem with "inertial" frames of reference remains.