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davidw

I'm reminded of this quote:

"I was in favour of space exploration until I realised what it'd mean for date time libraries"

https://twitter.com/joe_jag/status/510048646482894848

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All space time clocks may run at GMT+00 with no regional differences.

Actually we may remove time zones all together too. So the day time of 3pm will be different everywhere. For calendar months and seasons we already have it like that, in both hemispheres. The only issue is backward incompatibility with legacy movies, books who talk about breakfast at 8am. Similarly, a love song which talks about April/May being a sunny warm time sounds weird in southern hemipshere. Let's get rid of Roman legacy code in our civilization :)

Removing time zones terrestially, while seeming attractive on the surface, generates more problems than it solves: http://qntm.org/abolish

There's a lot that could be improved with how we handle things like Daylight Savings Time today, but eliminating time zones is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This article was pretty thoroughly debunked last time it was linked here. It focuses on how we'd remove timezones and not actually offer alternatives to their most basic uses.

Oh no, it's much worse than that. On Earth you can generally treat time as being the same speed everywhere. If you start a timer at T1 UTC and run it for a locally observed 60 seconds you can expect the current UTC time to be T1+60 seconds. In space relativistic effects stop being negligible and you might find that UTC time is T1+61 seconds.

We have clocks that are wrong all the time already, I'm not sure how that makes date time libraries worse. GPS satellites are in space, they have to deal with relativity effects, and mostly everything seems fine.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279076/why-does-the-lea...

One second can be a big deal.

Or you can change the relative speed with which it tracks its time. Smearing is already used for additional seconds, it should be possible to be used here, too.

But GPS satellites have constant velocity so calculating this is pretty easy. For a future super probe that accelerates and decelerates and maybe passes through many different gravitational fields (giving a general relativity time dilation) and perhaps does so for many centuries, the possibility of error mounts up.

I'd vote for time being defined in terms of some universally observable phenomenon. Say the rate of cooling of the CMB. Anyone with a super spiffy radio telescope anywhere in the universe could then tell what time it is.

It seems attractive to me at first blush. However, with time zones, when you ask your associate on the other side of the world "what time is it there?", the implications of when you can expect communication is almost immediately. Having to ask "when do you get off work" seems a little more cumbersome to figure out all the following details.

But hey, we muddle through the current chaos, I'm sure we can muddle through any other chaos.

http://qntm.org/abolish

So you want to abolish time zones? Relevant nice write up on the subject

Let's get rid of Roman legacy code in our civilization :)

I think that's a bridge too far. We can't even rid the world of QWERTY keyboards. :-)

Or Imperial measurements in the U.S., or driving on the left in the Commonwealth countries, or non-Unicode encoding in Japan, or right-to-left writing in the Middle East. Whenever an agreement on anything is reached in most of the world, there's often some conversion benefits for whoever holds out signing up to it.

The US does not use Imperial measures, they use Queen Anne measures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units

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