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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#151

Post by cornholio »

crote wrote: post #145
cornholio wrote: post #125

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 day…

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…

> 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.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#152

Post by crote »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #143

"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said". I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different clock technologies that work in different ways? Or are they saying this because there is only one "best" technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the moon?

It's a physics thing which affects all clocks.

According to special relativity clocks on the Moon will run slower because the moon is orbiting the Earth, so the clock has a higher relative speed. However, general relativity says the clock will run faster, because the Moon has a smaller gravitational field than Earth.

In this case the second effect will dominate, so even a perfect clock will run faster: it's not the clock which is fast, it is time itself. GPS satellites have to deal with the same issue.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#153

Post by ajuc »

cyberpunk wrote: post #135
cornholio wrote: post #125

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 day…

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

This breaks all computer games and also internet (I think?).

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#154

Post by ajuc »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #143

"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said". I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different clock technologies that work in different ways? Or are they saying this because there is only one "best" technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the moon?

They should have written "time runs faster on the Moon than on Earth". Clocks just measure it. You can't solve this with a better clock :)

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#155

Post by likis »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #124
likis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though ..." Don't we already have that with UTC / Zulu time?

Do you encounter people using UTC regularly? While it's the closest we have to a world timezone, in my experience people don't use it much outside of a technical context. I usually see Americans treat Eastern Time as a standard, with references to Pacific sometimes. In the EU, where I am, CET is the usual timezone used for specifying a time internationally. And regardless of the location, it's very common for people…

I agree to an extent, but I don't really see the problem either. If I book a meeting or something through any calendar application, the timezone will be fixed to the local timezone. Let's say I book it for 13:00 in my calendar, it will show up as a meeting at 14:00 in their calendar if they are +1 from me.

So whenever I specify a time with someone that could be in a different timezone, I would either make sure that I am using some application that solves it for me, or I would AT LEAST include the timezone.

Maybe I'm just not encountering the same problems that you do.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#156

Post by mschuster91 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
Taywee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I hate timezones with a passion but the more I think about them, the more I recognize they're the least bad option available. They correctly optimize for making most common cases trivial, while rare cases relatively easy. I think it needs to be said here: cross-timezone scheduling and datetime math are extremely rare relative to people's daily experience. It may not be obvious to us here, because we're much mor…

The worst problem with timezones IMO is that they are way too big [1], compared to what they should be if the world were equally divided into 24 hour "strips". Europe for example has CET which stretches all the way west to Spain, despite UTC+1 ending somewhere along the French-German border - so Spain and France are 1 hour "ahead" despite not needing to.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#157

Post by darkwater »

rascul wrote: 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.

The trade-off balance is not that big towards your desire to justify such a gigantic mentality shift for all humanity. In other words, it will never happen. (Ok, maybe the DST and the 24h clock only can go away at some point, but TZs will stay)

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#158

Post by aqme28 »

cornholio wrote: post #125

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 day…

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.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#159

Post by eru »

cornholio wrote: post #141
cyberpunk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 perpetrate…

Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth). Timezones are just for displaying to humans.
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