Based on a completely superficial review there are three almost guaranteed ways to become unhinged; studying infinities, refactoring legacy code, and working with timezones.
We’ve gone too far. Everyone just switch to UTC please. Yes, it means some will go to bed at 2pm and get up at 10pm, so what.
go to bed at 2pm and get up at 10pm
While we are making reasonable demands, stop using 12 hour time. Sincerely, everyone else.
And please, get all countries to actually start properly accepting ISO 8601 format for dates as a mandatory universal standard…
Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/1179/
That’s it, I’m only using epoch from now on, that’s enough of your time zone shenanigans
So, in this case a moon timezone, and more generally a “space timekeeping framework” makes sense because time actually moves at a different speed on the moon, so epoch times wouldn’t actually stay in sync.
If the goal of “time” is to make it easier to reason about simultaneous things, then space makes that way more complicated.
It’s just tricky to condense that into a headline that conveys the point.The concept of “simultaneous” breaks down over relativistic distances too so that’s equally fucked
Except the length of a second is different on the moon because of relativity. So even utc is wrong.
UTC doesn’t become wrong, you can either just accept a different pace of the clock, i.e. earth ppl will be ever so late to a meeting or it’s just a different kind of timezone conversion. Better would be to have a single time based on the reference frame of the center of the galaxy and everyone keep there time relative to that.
just use a time based on light?, like meter is based on the speed fo light in the vaccum, or use atomic based times?, like how long take for the hydrogen atom todo something bla bla bla
That’s actually what’s different on the moon. Relativity and all that means that time itself actually flows differently on the moon than it does on earth.
The actual problem they’re working to solve is around timekeeping and GPS applications in different reference frames, but it’s hard to make a short headline about.
When I first saw the news I was thinking “there’s no way atoms vibrate differently on the moon” but you’re right it’s about perspective and I’ve realized there’s no way I’m smart enough to handle timezones on an interplanetary scale. I can only hope that the difference between earth seconds and moon seconds can be expressed as a consistent ratio.
I will gladly use some programming library invented in the basement of a university powered by coffee, and rage.
It’s well understood math, but it’s “only” relativistic orbital mechanics.
It boils down to a pretty consistent number, but how you get there is related to the weight of the moon, how far it is from earth, and how fast it’s going.
Since the moon is going different speeds at different places in it’s orbit, the number actually changes slightly over the month.They’re just using the average though, since it makes life far easier. We use the average for earth too, since clocks move differently at different altitudes or distances from the equator.
The proposed time zone is to drift about 1 second every 50 years. I also suspect it wouldn’t really be a time zone in the same sense as the time zones we know - it would just be a standardised calibration reference. Dates and times expressed in “moon time” would probably just be some leap second off of a known Earth time zone, and because it’s mere seconds over centuries, I think the only use of this time zone is to calculate ultra-precise time diffs between two earth datetimes when the observer is on the moon. At least, that’s how I interpret the articles I can find about it.
No different than any other project the PM/PO team cooks up. Tons of work for no user base.
Nah dog, its gonna be UTC. End of story.
Sure, we can compromise; they can have their own timezone, but it has a constant time value.
const moonTime = DateTime.Utc.MoonTimeAs in, it is perpetually 4:20 PM on the moon?
nice.
Shouldn’t the moon have… 24 time zones as well, depending where on the moon you currently are?
The moon’s day length is so long that it wouldn’t make any sense for any crewed mission to use it, they’re going to need their own lights on an arbitrary 24 hour cycle anyway, so there’s no reason not to have every future crewed mission there use the same one
