Sure, we can compromise; they can have their own timezone, but it has a constant time value.
const moonTime = DateTime.Utc.MoonTime
As in, it is perpetually 4:20 PM on the moon?
To the moon 🚀 🚀 🚀
nice.
That sounds… iffy. Thing is that UTC lags more and more behind TAI as UTC takes the earth’s rotation into account, introducing leap seconds so that all the timezones don’t slowly drift across the globe. Moon people care preciously little about the earth’s rotation around its own axis, more relevant is its own day/night cycle which (because tidal lock) is an earth month. The system might just be stable enough so that UTC can simultaneously sync to that, you’d have to ask an astronomer.
Actually, no, forget it: The moon moves quite fast relatively to the earth’s surface, more than enough for relativistic effects to apply – they also apply to GPS satellites, stuff simply wouldn’t work if those things ran on Newtonian maths. Sooner or later it’s going to need adjustments due to that.
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.
Great explanation, but unfortunately the post in the image OC missed the absolute best part, the parody article.
It’s also important for things like GPS, as related to other planets, as well as orbital maneuvering.
What they’re actually being told to build is “write down the rules for moon time”, which is basically what you said but defined in terms of “this much faster than earth time”, and a system doing the same thing on other planets or places in the solar system.
So it’s less a timezone and more a time system, and instructions for how you calibrate your atomic clock on the moon and reconcile the difference with terrestrial clocks.
Serious question…why would an entirely isolated GPS constellation need to have “a time zone” as opposed to it’s own epoch (like unix)? It’s on the receiver side that all the computation happens, aren’t the satellites essentially just announcing an agreed-upon time? Wouldn’t the client be able to do it’s own comparison of “it’s time”, as long as it’s source of time is also synchronized with the constellation?
Please end timezones. We only need one universal one and that’s it.
it’s called milliseconds since epoch
Relativity theory enters the chat
It’s own timezone? It’ll need it’s own clock. A moon day is about 28 Earth days.
How long is a moon year?
If a year is how long it takes to go around the sun then a Moon year is the same as Earth’s
That may make sense if you’re on the surface of the moon, but that’s not the case. The moon time zone is for the moon orbiting space station proposed by NASA
std::chrono::neutronstar_clock
i agree. the moon should suffer with all of us.
the fact that the acronym for Coordinated Lunar Time is LTC tells you everything you need to know about how this will work.
That’s why I prefer TAI time zone
The PR is getting way ahead of rocketry results. It’s not helping that Elon is involved.
I say we compromise we will take the moon but they must give up daylight savings. it’s only fair.
Adds moonlight savings
Will it follow the lunar calendar?
That’s it, I’m only using epoch from now on, that’s enough of your time zone shenanigans
I suspect that won’t help. The reason the Moon needs a time zone is because of gravitational time dilation, time literally runs slower down here on Earth’s surface relative to the Moon’s surface. A computer on the Moon gains an extra 58.7 microseconds each Earth day, so if you’re programming something that’ll be running on Lunar time you’ll need to account for that.
The point of the lunar time zone is not to have a specific UTC offset like other timezones. The moon would have its own set of atomic clocks, and time could be coordinated with earth based on ratio instead of offset.
They’re not going to be maintaining literal atomic clocks on the Moon for this. They’ll apply a mathematical adjustment to UTC based on what the physics calculations say is happening. The details of that adjustment are what NASA has yet to develop. It could involve subtracting a “leap second” from lunar time at intervals, leap seconds are already used for keeping UTC in sync with the solar time so it’s an established process. Or maybe they’ll just let Lunar time continue drifting relative to Earth, in which case there’ll be a different “epoch” on each.
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
Yup. So building a system for “how we build time systems in different reference frames” and “define how we relate those to earth” isn’t irrational, just makes for headlines that are either difficult or very misleading.
Don’t you dare, I have enough trouble reading 24 hour time.
Except the length of a second is different on the moon because of relativity. So even utc is wrong.
Yep, and the math gives different results based on if you’re on the moon or on earth.
No the second is still 9192631770 hyperfine transitions of Cs-133 on the moon and that’s the same length of time at least unless you want to severely annoy physicists by implying that the laws of nature aren’t constant throughout the universe. It’s just that from our perspective it looks like time is flowing differently there.
You are correct that if you are on thee moon and have a cs-133 atom with you is second will take that many transitions. And if you do the same thing on Earth, a second will take the same number of transitions.
But things get weird when you are on earth and observe a cs-133 atom that is on the moon. Because you are in different reference frames, you are traveling at different speeds and are in different gravity wells time is moving at different rates. This means that a cs atom locally will transition a different number of times in a second from your point of view on Earth vs one you are observing on the moon.
And it would all be reversed if you were on the Moon observing a clock back on the Earth.
They already have to account for this with GPS satellites. They all have atomic clocks on them but they don’t run at the same speed as clocks that are on the ground. The satellites are moving at a great speed and are further from the center of the earth than us, so the software that calculates the distance from your phone to the satellite have to use Einstein’s equations to account for the change in the rate of time.
Relativity is weird.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
The second […] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.
Do not matter for relativity though, always same change.
So are you saying that a caesium-133 atom observed on both the Earth and the Moon to oscillate 9,192,631,770 times will not represent the same absolute span of time?
So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?
Does this have to do with the specific gravity fields of both observers, in that those fields affect how the atom oscillates?
Or is there something else I’m missing?
If special relativity is the answer, all good. I’m an electrical engineer trained in classic physics, so I’ll rest knowing that I’d probably need to study that to understand the time differences.
It’s that relativity thing where each person will see the oscillations happening correctly, but when they look at what the other person did, the answer will seem wrong.
The difference is small enough that it really only matters if you’re NASA and building moon GPS. MPS?
So, one observer will see those oscillations happen faster than the other?
Not quite. In each observer’s frame of reference, time appears to pass the same; it’s only when you try to reconcile the between two objects that are not at rest with respect to each other does relativity show up.
Basically, when you bring someone back to Earth, the observers will find that their watches don’t match up even though both observers experience time passing the same way as normal (because the oberserver is by definition at rest with respect to their own frame of reference).
TL; DR: Relativity is a pain in the ass and makes no sense in everyday terms.
edit: disclaimer - I am not a physicist and have not taken physics classes in a decade plus, but I do teach science at a college. I’m going mostly on half-remembered lectures and some random one-off discussions I’ve had with my buddy in the physics department over the past few years.
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 not too bad. Relativity says that no frame of reference is special.
-
On earth, a second looks like a second, but a second on the moon looks too quick.
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On the moon, the second looks like a second, but a second on earth looks too slow.
Both are actually correct. The simplest solution is to declare 1 to be the base reference. In this case, the earth second. Any lunar colonies will just have to accept that their second is slightly longer than they think it should be.
If it helps, the difference is tiny. A second is 6.5x10^-10 seconds longer. This works out to 56 microseconds per 24 hours. It won’t affect much for a long time. About the only thing affected would be a lunar GPS.
Galactic center is the frame to use for any space travel.
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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.
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.
Because it makes getting an intuitive sense of what solar time it is somewhere harder.
Can I call my grandma in a different country? Hmm what time is average midnight there. Okay 8 (so far, same thing as looking up a timezone), and it’s 18:00 now, so 10 hours after midnight, which is like my 23:00. Needlessly complicated with extra steps for the average person.
Sure, you can say, I’ll call you X and that will mean the same thing everywhere, but does not have any information about solar time. And these days, it’s automatically converted if you use a calendar (which you should). This is the point of programming, to make the USERS life easier, not the dev. The end is more important than the means, I think we can agree.
Or: what time is it where my grandma is? Okay, cool, I have a sense of what that is immediately after knowing the answer.
There are reasons we do things this way. Working roughly to solar times has more benefits than being able to say a time and it mean the same moment everywhere.
I say we leave things the way they are, works okay.
Just ask once what time is midday, and do some math
Which I think we can all agree is more work than what we currently need to.
It’s not just one addition, it’s 2 operations following knowing what time midnight is to understand what the solar time it is: what time is it now, minus what time is their midnight, and then you have to add that back to what your midnight is to get a sense of the time. Or you just start thinking in solar time WHICH IS WHAT WE ALREADY DO.
That’s 2 calculations. Currently we do 0.
Innately knowing what time means in films, talking to people over the phone, going to a new country. It would be a huge pain in the arse.
"They met up at 13:00“ great. So where are they in this film? Forcing exposition where currently you might let it be vague.
People who advocate for one timezone simply haven’t thought it through.
Like when i find a recipe that measures volume in Cups, weight in Stones and temperature i Fucks?
Maybe this freak should just text uncle steve whatever he wanted, or a “call me when it’s convinient” message, and then steve will probably see the notification at some point in his morning routine before too long. If this guy really needed to call steve anyways, for whatever reason, he shouldn’t care about time zones, because it’s an emergency.
If you were commonly calling whatever place you were calling, you’d probably be able to intuit what time they woke up anyways, so it’s all moot.
I dunno. I think it’s pretty easy to make a big deal out of time zones and calendar measurements and whatever but I don’t think it really, actually matters that much, because the main thing they facilitate is communication. Time zones and timelines should be engineered more around the human condition, I think, than around anything else.
But then, I think, to construct anything around the human condition is kind of paradoxical. If you create a schedule, then you have created a schedule. I.e. if you construct time, then you imply the existence of something that needs to be measured. That implies deadlines.
Frankly, that’s too much pressure for me, so I’m going to take the more controversial stance here: Abolish time. No more time, no more numbers measuring when I should do what. You’re either gonna tell me whether or not to do something now, or to do it later. The people gotta learn that time is more subjective and contingent, and they gotta start showing up to their work shifts whenever they want to make money, instead of just showing up at a given time when the fuckin steam whistle goes off like it’s the 1800s.
tldr - you’ll just have to do the conversions in your head now because it’s useful to know where the sun is at different points on the earth when trying to communicate across those points.
Obviously it would require some getting used to, but already people can’t comprehend time zones, so that won’t change. My grandma called in the middle of the night all throughout our three year stay in Australia.
Ohh, she knew.
People comprehend days, they comprehend that their day starts at 00:00 and ends at 23:59. Calling to the other side of the world isn’t something most people.do on a daily basis
Not even that. I’m sure you’ve heard “it’s tomorrow when I’ve slept”, no matter what the clock says. Switching terms at midnight will cause confusion more often than not.
Are you high or just not reading what you’re writing? Are you literally claiming that people will get confused when days start at 00:00 and end at 23:59, wherever they live in the world? Because literally no one in this world, except maybe you, is confused by that, because it makes intuitive sense.
and you’ve never been up with friends past your bedtime. 🙄
It’s gonna get much worse when you start to try mapping days of the week onto the new times. Are days gonna be the same everywhere as well, to stay from 0 to 24? If so, have fun saying things like “Let’s find a time on Wednesday/Thursday”. People likely couldn’t be bothered and would probably just use the day that their normal wake-up time falls on to mean the full solar day instead. At which point you could also just say okay, weekdays are still following local solar days. But now what weekday is it halfway around the world? Now you need to look up their solar day.
All this to say - abolishing time zones will introduce the reverse problem for every problem that it seemingly solves. You can’t change the fact that our planet rotates and people in different locations will follow different schedules. Turning the lookup-table upside down is just a cosmetic change that doesn’t remove the situation that’s causing the confusion. I’d rather just stick with the set of problems that we’re already used to dealing with.
Lol.
None of the negatives that this troll article name are actual negatives that normal humans have.
Especially the argument for timezones is “I can just Google what time it is in <timezone>”…
You can always Google “what time is it at <location>”
Which only works when timezones exist. Without timezones, the question would need to be “what time of day is it in <location>?”, and you’d get “morning” or “afternoon”. Any answer to that question is inherently more fuzzy than 8:25 or 17:16.
What time is it in Melbourne?
“The Standard Time is 4:05. The time of day is equivalent to 14:15 in your location.”
Wasn’t that hard to solve. And it’s actually more precise, since it incorporates the changing times of sunrise and sundown.
oh so now we’re right back around at time zones again, wonderful.
except now it’s even more fun because there is zero standardization at all, but users are still going to expect for their computing devices to tell them a time that makes sense. Ah, but culture X thinks the day starts “6 hours before sunrise” and culture Y is more “the day starts when the sun is halfway between sunset and sunrise” and culture Z thinks something even more insane. Oops, now we’ve got locale-based time zones. Locale awareness is honestly even worse than time zones because its just so damn unexpected at times. My own computer has a horrifying mix of US and Europe locale settings, and that is already crazy enough.
stupid people will always think everything is just so simple.
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/
I’m just saying, but we did.
Pretty much every electronic thing you own that resembles a computer (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, even your damned TV) uses UTC. Every. Single. One. Translates that time to “local” whenever it needs to.
So when your TV goes from 9:32 to 9:33, is just showing the converted time from UTC each time.
Almost every device on the planet is keeping time in UTC.
Just because you don’t see UTC time on your device, doesn’t mean that’s not what’s happening. I had an issue where I needed to get into my computer’s bios for something, as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was “wrong” because it was in UTC. I’m sure plenty of newer BIOS dialogs are configured to account for timezones now, so yeah. I might be unique in this. It’s still there.
But would the moon work on a 24 hour system at all?
I can’t believe I just typed that as a serious comment
Didn’t Bajor have a 28 hour day? I’m now voting for Universal Bajoran Time
Honestly quote irrelevant. It’s hidden away. It’s not shown to us. It could use literally any frame of reference, like farts since the beginning of times, if it’s converted for you, then it’s not.
Almost all computers count time as seconds from the epoch (midnight 1/1/1970). That then gets converted into a readable time, which may go through UTC to be converted first, but that’s not how it’s storing it.
You’re referring to UNIX time. And you’re correct.
It’s a count of how many seconds from midnight, January first, 1970, UTC.
Local computers update that time, still in UTC, from time servers, usually over NTP, then translate that time reading from UNIX time in UTC, to a human readable format in the local time zone.
All computers are still keeping track of time from Epoch in UTC.
Unix time is far less universal in computing than you might hope. A few exceptions I’m aware of:
- Most real-time clock hardware stores datetime as separate binary-coded decimal fields representing months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as one byte each, and often the year too (resulting in a year 2100 limit).
- Python’s datetime, WIN32’s SYSTEMTIME, Java’s LocalDateTime, and MySQL’s DATETIME similarly have separate attributes for year, month, day, etc.
- NTFS stores a 64-bit number representing time elapsed since the year 1601 in 100-nanosecond resolution for things like file creation time.
- NTP uses an epoch of midnight 1900-01-01 with unsigned seconds elapsed and an unusual base-2 fractional part
- GPS uses an epoch of midnight 1980-01-06 with a week number and time within the week as separate values.
Converting between time formats is a common source of bugs and each one will overflow in different ways. A time value might overflow in the year 2036, 2038, 2070, 2100, 2156, or 9999.
Also, Unix time is often managed with a separate nanoseconds component for increased resolution. Like in C
struct timespec
, modern *nix filesystems like ext4/xfs/btrfs/zfs, etc.
as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was “wrong” because it was in UTC
Because you don’t use Windows. Windows by default stores local time, not UTC, to the RTC. This behavior can be overriden with a registry tweak. Some Linux distro installer disks (at least Ubuntu and Fedora, maybe others) will try to detect if your system has an existing Windows install and mimicks this behavior if one exists (equivalent to
timedatectl set-local-rtc 1
) and otherwise defaults to storing UTC, which is the more sane choice.Storing localtime on a computer that has more than one bootable OS becomes a particularly noticable problem in regions that observe DST, because each OS will try to change the RTC by one hour on its first boot after the time change.
That’s a nice theory, it would be a shame if I was only running Windows 10 on my desktop.
Spoiler: I am. No Linux or any other os or bootloader in sight.
That’s strange. As far as I can tell from any web searches, every version Windows still defaults to storing local time to the hardware clock and there are no reports of that changing with an update, nor is there any exposed setting control to configure this behavior outside of regedit. If you’re curious enough, you can check the current setting in the registry at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation
. Windows maintains the current time as UTC if and only if the RealTimeIsUniversal key is present and nonzero.I expect it’s more likely some other issue would make the BIOS display an hour that’s inconsistent with your local timezone. For example, maybe a bug in the BIOS, maybe a timezone offset setting within the BIOS, or maybe a dead clock battery.
No, TAI
Why switch? It’s not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it’s intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that’s why we make the computers do the tricky work.
required reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
Personally, I think it’s just easier. Yes, computers and stuff, but we’ve perverted local time long ago with DST and country spanning single time zones, so might as well use one global zone and get rid of the confusion altogether.
If it makes a dev’s life easier there’s no reason not to upend half the planet.
In Europe we’ve been talking about ending DST for years now and it hinges on countries deciding which zone they want to adopt permanently. Why can’t they decide? Because the notion of getting up at six and having lunch at 12 is stronger than the cosmic fact of the sun being in the middle of the sky. We just need to decide how we want daylight to fit into that grind.
I say fuck that. If we can’t decide, don’t. Since we’re changing everything anyway, going to UTC will force everyone to think how THEY want to live their lives. When to open stores, whether to move opening hours in winter or summer, when to go to work (both early birds and night owls are great).
Plus in today’s globalized world, 14:00 will be 14:00 everywhere. You decide for yourself if you’re working then or not if somebody sends a meeting request halfway across the world.
Britain: hey guys let’s just use my time k?
Europe: Fuck you.
No, 14:00 will be 2pm in freedom land.
Fuck em, send them 24h times and let them figure it out.
Those that propose moving to UTC should take responsibility and take the +12h offset. Why should we let the brits enjoy +0 offset while the rest of the world got the short end of the stick (especially those living in the pacific)?
Sure, I don’t mind. I live in CET.
CEST now…
UTC does not account for time dilation.
No different than any other project the PM/PO team cooks up. Tons of work for no user base.
Why… why is the world like this?
Our sorrow, despondency, and terror are their sustenance.
Because the world is seen and directed by layers upon layers of abstractions that get divorced from reality but do give monetary benefits when manipulated in some way.
Sigh… too true.
I will use moontime. Anybody wants to schedule bullshit meetings will have to commit to figuring out when actually works for them.
Not true, space agencies will use it… once.
until they lose a multi billion dollar mission because of conversion errors
It’s pretty much a requirement now to use the metric system for everything.
Ok so now they must split it all into 10 timezones? 😂
Imagine if Americans use a different unit system for time 😱
So, I read something on this a little while ago. It has to do with the moon’s weaker gravity making time progress at a different rate, so the lunar time zone gives a precise reference for sub-second (nanosecond I guess?) precision manoeuvres and such like.
The time dilation on the surface of the moon would cause a clock to be 20 milliseconds ahead of a clock on earth after one year
it might be easier just to synchronize the space station clock with earth once a month, but I guess NASA would go for nanosecond precision if they could
Anyone else keep nearly everything set to UTC?
In the military that’s all we used. It’s called Zulu time in the Army and it makes for coordinating events in multiple time zones fairly easy. I would assume the moon would be the same since there will 100% be a moon base with military.
I have response teams in a “follow the sun” model as well as having my US team spread coast to coast, plus all our clients set their servers to UTC. It makes the most sense to keep something set to UTC at a moment’s glance.