If we were to build a colony on Mars with normal people doing normal everyday things, we need something more than that. The first question we want to ask ourselves is, do we want to keep the SI defined second? If we don't care, then we have free reign to do whatever we want. We can define a Mars second to be 1/86,400th of a Mars day, and keep the 24 hour, 60 minute, 60 second time system we use on Earth. Or we switch to a metric time system, with a 10 hour day, 100 minute hours, 100 second minutes. Or a 1 day long day, and deci, ceni, milli, micro days. Or whatever.
If we want to keep SI compatibility, we need to keep the second. The Martian solar day is 87,755.224 seconds long. 87,755 factors into 5^2 * 53 * 67. So we can do 25 hours per day, 53 minutes per hour, 67 seconds per minute to give an 87,755 second day. Unfortunately there would need to be a leap second once every 4-5 days.
Then there's the question of the calendar. Perhaps fortunately, this gives us the opportunity to restart from scratch, because the calendar we use is such a goddamned clusterfuck, even worse than our time system. Unfortunately, the number of days in a Martian year (668 and change) does not lend itself to a clean division into tidy periods. You could have 23 months of 29 days each, with each month having 4 7 day weeks plus one holiday. This will give you a 667 day year. Add another annual holiday at the beginning of the year, plus an optional leap-holiday in the middle of the year.
Or you could split it up into 37 months of 3 weeks, each with 6 days. This gives you a 666 day year, so sprinkle in 2-3 bonus holidays per year.
There are a lot of considerations. It needs to be given more thought. Hopefully more thought than we've given to Earth's timekeeping systems.
I think absolutely yes. Any Mars colony is going to import a lot of equipment and technology from Earth. All of that is going to assume the SI second. Not just for measuring time, but also as part of the definition of derived units such as newtons. Martian colonists will have no practical choice but to use the SI second since all their Earth-manufactured equipment is going to assume it.
Plus, if they tried to introduce a distinct Martian second, soon they'd have a mix of SI units (based on the SI second) and slightly different Martian units (based on the Martian second), and that would produce Mars Climate Orbiter style disasters.
> Perhaps fortunately, this gives us the opportunity to restart from scratch
People won't. People will want to use the Earth calendar because they are keeping in sync with Earth news and Earth culture. Maybe after a few centuries, Mars will feel sufficiently independent from Earth, that it might want to introduce a new calendar. However, by then Martians will be thoroughly used to the Earth calendar, it will be a centuries-old part of their Martian culture heritage, and they probably won't want to change it.
Almost all Martian settlers will be living underground, and even aboveground the light at mid-day is extremely dim. You can set the day to whatever length you want, regardless of the Martian sol, and nobody will notice.
Likewise, months and years on Earth are for tracking agricultural seasons, but nobody will be growing crops on the Martian surface. Set the year to whatever you want, with or without months, and no civilians will notice.
Then there is defining standards on Mars, 24hour days kinda not going to translate, so again, more forward thinking needed. As for Mars GPS, bit of a way off, but I'm sure the good old atomic clocks will work.
I guess the job title of "Systems Engineer of Time" may become a reality one day after all.
Though, it dawned on me, Mars could have real time zones. Not the stupid political mess we have today. Perfect, logical longitudinal time zones from the get go. That right there is more than enough reason for me to leave this planet.
But let's be honest, Mars will be colonized, politics will arise and the same fuckery will happen eventually.
Am I the only one that liked it?
"DANGER: ABI incompatibility. Updating to this kernel requires extra work or you won't be able to login: install a snapshot instead"
and raging
The answer we came up with was: thank god we'd be retired or dead by the time it became a problem that we had to deal with day to day.
You would need something like international atomic time to be the basis for it, but unlike TAI which is the weighted average of some 400 atomic clocks on the surface of the planet, you would need to define it with respect to free space (which we can't access) and with respect to a single event that's accessible to everyone yet human scaled enough that it happened in written history (the best we came up with was the first nuclear blast).
Then you would need to have a calculation that turned it into local time which would be completely decoupled from any actual time keeping. Think printing the result of a square root in Roman numerals vs trying to do the calculation in Roman numerals.
Unix epoch is laughably inadequate for anything like that. Basically we have nothing today and you'd need an international agreement to have a sane time keeping system going forwards.
Everyone will probably just use Eastern Time on mars complete with Daylight saving, maybe TAI if we're lucky.
In addition, they also keep track of their cold sleep time, because if you want to meet your spouse 50 years from now, you want to try and keep the same relative age.
or boot the thing from a dban ISO and wipe the SSD, re-use it.
https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chro...
Disclaimer: Mostly just posting this to plug Escape Pod. No affiliation, but it’s one of my favorite short fiction podcasts.
Then you start to get the new factor of planetary distance wobble adjustments. Which will be fun as you start to add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem into time models.
Beltalowda showxa ere tim wit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date keya? Beltalowda tili du pati (wit walowda walowda dansa unte walowda walowda rowm unte da adewu "Piyat Minut"?) fo Yitim unte showxa ere Mundiye, Tusidiye, unte kopeng. Amash beltalowda na tenye wowt fo "months" tumang. Imalowda tu inya, tu "legacy", sasa ke?
It's easy to use 8 hours for a shift like we do (and 8 hours for sleep), but our shifts are based around day/night, sleep cycles, and our human limits for work within Earth's gravity. That could change on Mars though. Since there won't be weather seasons or agriculture for a long while, work shifts will likely have a bigger influence on the decision rather than the reasons we have them on Earth.
> It is currently not possible to use ssh to login between systems on MCT and any earth time zone
The commit going on to call the config TZ=MCT could totally be a typo that will persist for eternity, just like the "referer" header.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars#Coordinate...
I do like it though, good to see some innovation in the AFD jokes department.
