OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)
marc.info
marc.info
> It is currently not possible to use ssh to login between systems on MCT and any earth time zone
Full handshake requires a few hours of round trips.
6 trips x 11 min each: That is 66min for the handshake.
@_o
[1]: https://techieuniversity.com/ssh-work-flow/ [2]: https://www.mars-one.com/faq/technology/how-does-the-mars-ba...
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.
or boot the thing from a dban ISO and wipe the SSD, re-use it.
Judging from our past several decades of network effects, I'd guess earth-origin operating systems will still dominate, with perhaps a long tail of poorly-adopted alternatives (as with, on the language side, BELTABOL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zTGjy9KeW4cqagXHlVDwKmcZ1mE... ).
"DANGER: ABI incompatibility. Updating to this kernel requires extra work or you won't be able to login: install a snapshot instead"
and raging
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.
Also, don't call people out of the blue and expect them to pick up anyway. Maybe your uncle had to work late and is sleeping even though the sun is technically out.
I know, it's the weirdest thing calling folks. People pretending like calling others with a phone is the purpose of them. Jeez, the audacity. Not following social rules of using a phone. People need to construct some socially agreed concepts to help cooperate with each other.
So no, my take on the argument was appropriate. Their stance was an absurd concept based in teenage destroy-the-system angst rather than taking reality as it is. If there's a truly better way of making sure two parties show up at the same "when", then let's hear it.
Am I the only one that liked it?
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.
Luckily so far the practical propulsion concepts we have max out around 10% the speed of light for reasonable amounts of propellant, so we have a couple decades left to figure this out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time
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.
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.
Direct normal insolation on Mars seems to be in the 590 W/m^2 range.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=590+W+insolation+mars&t=ffab&ia=we...
That's brighter than an average winter day in Seattle.
http://www.weatherjon.org/meteo/pages/station/climate.php?va...
(click on "Month graphs", and then "Maximum".
Even still, being able to see the Martian sky means being exposed to radiation for which no intervening atmosphere or magnetosphere exists to protect you. I don't think this changes much about a Martian settler's unlikeliness to prefer to set their clocks according to solar time.
About the only practical benefit of a Martian colony is to serve as a last-ditch backup of human civilization in the event of an asteroid strike. Mars won't be a powerhouse of industry, commerce, or culture; at best there will be some modest scientific output. It's a tomb world.
Give humanity a few millennia to build a Dyson sphere around the sun and maybe then you could start reasonably terraforming Mars into somewhere intrinsically nice to live, over the course of a few additional tens of millennia.
I don't think you need a dyson sphere level of energy output, or even a single millennium to terraform mars to be human habitable.
It's a big project, to be sure, but if we were dedicated to it I think we could accomplish it in <1,000 years.
I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, the habitability sucks, but it does have plenty of natural resources. Combined with the low gravity, I suspect it could be a useful manufacturing and refueling hub, especially as a pit stop on the way to the outer planets.
That said, I think Ceres is a bit more viable for that, due to closer proximity to the asteroid belt (since it's in the asteroid belt) and due to it being a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons (water and hydrocarbons being pretty crucial for both refueling operations and human colonization). If the gravity on Ceres ends up being too low for human comfort, that just makes it easier to build centrifuge habitats, be it on the surface or in orbit.
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.
I like Kim Stanley Robinson's approach, as described in the Mars trilogy. They use standard seconds, but at 12:00 midnight, the clocks just stop for about 39 minutes. (Computers just use seconds-since-the-epoch or something and are unaffected.)
Martian colonies will still care about Earth calendars, but only to the extent that they have to deal with Earth. Kind of like dealing with a different timezone on Earth.
https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/martian-calendar
How important are the seasons going to be for people who have to spend the vast majority of their time indoors due to the lack of a breathable atmosphere – and possibly even underground for protection against radiation?
Maybe one day Mars will be terraformed and given a breathable atmosphere, and maybe even some kind of artificial magnetosphere can be created to protect against radiation. But that is going to take many centuries.
The fact is that modern societies don't really need a calendar synchronised to the seasons. Most jobs nowadays the seasons are not very important. This is especially true in parts of the world where the difference in weather between the seasons is less marked (like where I live, here it never snows in winter). Fields such as agriculture where seasons are important can always keep track of the seasons independently from the calendar, or using a special purpose agricultural calendar. In fact, that's what is traditionally done in much of the Islamic world – the Islamic calendar was used for most purposes, which is out of sync with the seasons. Those jobs for which seasons were important, such as farmers, also used a separate solar calendar. It was only in the 20th century that the need to participate in the global economy created pressure to use the Gregorian calendar instead.
> I like Kim Stanley Robinson's approach, as described in the Mars trilogy. They use standard seconds, but at 12:00 midnight, the clocks just stop for about 39 minutes
I don't know why you'd do that. On earth, clocks run from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 each day. On Mars, you'd just make them run to 24:39:34 instead. That way you can actually get precise times for events that occur in those extra 39 minutes and 35 seconds that happen each day. (Also, I'd hope people on Mars would be using 24 hour time–I'm one of those people who changes all their clocks to 24 hour time on Earth)
> Martian colonies will still care about Earth calendars, but only to the extent that they have to deal with Earth
For the first few decades at the very least, Martian colonies will be dealing with Earth an awful lot. A lot of goods will have to be imported from Earth. There will be a lot of focus on what they can locally manufacture on Mars, but they'll start with basic stuff like foodstuffs and simpler manufactured goods, and it will be a long time before Mars has leading-edge semiconductor fabs or a lot of other stuff like that.
There will also be continual immigration from Earth, and also people returning to Earth (whether temporarily or permanently). That's going to psychologically link them with Earth.
Martians are also going to consume a huge amount of cultural imports from Earth. You think on Mars they won't have Netflix, YouTube, etc? They'll replicate the content library into a Mars-based CDN and people will be watching it on Mars. It is going to take a long time before natively produced Martian media/entertainment content becomes more popular than the Earth-imported stuff. And I think that's going to tie Martians to Earth at least as much as trade ties and movement of people back and forth will. Martian colonies will undoubtedly develop some unique cultural aspects, but a huge amount of their culture is just going to be Earth imports.
Quite important, actually. Day and night cycles determine when solar power is available. You'll probably have some outdoor activity by humans (mining, construction, maintenance, etc...) that would be affected by daylight. (Perhaps most work will actually be done at night to avoid radiation from the sun?) And even in a hardened habitat you might have skylights (maybe long tubes or solar collectors connected to fiber optic cables rather than big windows in the ceiling).
> The fact is that modern societies don't really need a calendar synchronised to the seasons. Most jobs nowadays the seasons are not very important.
I work an indoor job, but still the seasons affect me quite a lot. (It's cold and rainy in the winter.) I don't know what the seasons are like on Mars, but I could imagine outdoor seasonal differences in temperature and light levels could have some impact on colony logistics.
> For the first few decades at the very least, Martian colonies will be dealing with Earth an awful lot.
Sure, but if the lead time between ordering a part and receiving delivery is something like six months or a year, it's probably hard to care that much about what's going on on Earth in real time. Sort of like someone who runs a business that buys parts from vendors in China is probably aware of the Chinese New Year. But that doesn't mean they run their life primarily off of the traditional Chinese calendar.
> I don't know why you'd do that. On earth, clocks run from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 each day. On Mars, you'd just make them run to 24:39:34 instead.
Well, sure, that's the practical solution. But it's less poetic than having some interval every day where the accounting of time is put on hold.
The question is whether that's important enough to justify using as the primary calendar for everyday use. You can always have a "Mars seasons" app which displays current and future Mars seasonal information in terms of the Earth calendar, or in terms of some kind of hybrid Earth-Mars calendar (like my suggestion of using Mars sols but Earth years.)
I don't know what they'd do about months. I reckon the easiest thing to do them would be just not to use them, and use a week count instead. A lot of businesses on earth prefer to use week counts instead of months for planning anyway, so we already know that approach works. For medium-term planning, you can divide the sol-weeks of the Earth year into four quarters. (The Earth-year contains 50-51 sol-weeks, so that divides into quarters of 12-13 sol-weeks–some quarters would be 7 sols longer than others.)
Assuming the energy on a Martian colony would come from solar panels, a Martian colony would still need to care significantly about the seasons and time of day.
Sure, in most if not all of the places future humans may come to inhabit, the celestial bodies will obviously have a strong influence on their lives and so they'll have to care. But, as I see it, this is more like marking events in a tool-tracked independent time system instead of having the time system devised around what's happening with celestial bodies around them because they can't do any better.
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 don't know how Windows deals with leap seconds (its epoch is in 1601 or something like that). Edit: it doesn't, the clock goes 1 second ahead of UTC and it's then fixed by NTP.
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.
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.
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.
I do like it though, good to see some innovation in the AFD jokes department.