Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.
Yeah you’d have to call it 29.5 days.
But joking aside, people live on ISS and use UTC despite their 90 minute “days”.
What we should really do is just get rid of all this crap and go with metric time that starts at an arbitrary moment and isn’t dependent on location.
What do you do about relativistic effects which cause time to move at different rates in different places, including on the Moon. From TFA:
> Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.
When people talk about clocks running faster or slower, it muddies the topic a little because it makes it sound like a fault of the clock. The clock is accurately measuring the time it experiences.
My favourite trivia on this topic is that this is not hypothetical. If the clocks on GPS satellites kept earth time (eg, without accounting for relativistic drift), the entire GPS system would accumulate 10km of error per day. This is a genuine thing with measurable, real-world effects.
One of the effects in time dilation, where moving clocks are measured to tick more slowly than an observer's "stationary" clock.
This isn't a new problem, though. GPS satellites have atomic clocks, and they drift 7uS or so per day due to time dilation.
Hafele-Keating experiment:
Aside: we can measure this effect on Earth, between the foot and top of a mountain. Tom Scott has a video about exactly that.
It’s just that time really passes quicker on Moon (not just an illusion).
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deviation_of_day_l...
Bad for scientists, not noticeable for normal life. Science could have its own standard?
Sure, our clocks are 24-hours-a-day because that syncs up well with the rotation of the earth. That's the scientists' argument, and it isn't why we use a 24 hour clock. The real reason is because it syncs up well with our biology. Its hard to imagine a world where these two things aren't synced up, but we're headed to some soon, and its likely that any clock which doesn't sync up to our biology (TimeAwake + TimeAsleep = 1 Day = 86400 seconds) will be rejected by anyone who isn't ordered by their commanding officer to use it.
Its like... just use UTC. Be done with it. The argument that "its an Earth Time, and we're Interplanetary now" feels like its coming from a sci-fi fan-fiction writer obsessed with The Expanse and solving problems before they exist. The most important priority for any timekeeping system is that its Useful. The second highest priority is that its Scientifically or Mathematically Beautiful, and this second priority is so far below the first one that we invented timezones and daylight savings time and everyone who has ever had to think critically about either of these things wants to jump off a fucking bridge but we tolerate it because they're Useful (and, we're getting rid of DST, because we've recognized that its Not So Useful, again, Usefulness drives everything).
Here's what's going to happen: they'll invent some kind of new Lunar Time with 29.35 earth-day long days or some other nonsense. Every clock on the wall at Moonbase Alpha will have both Lunar Time and UTC and probably US Central Time because Houston & NASA. The scientists who invent it will pat themselves on the back. The janitors who clean the place will have their shifts scheduled in UTC hours and the Gregorian calendar ("yeah man I'm off at 8pm and I don't work again till Monday, yeah I guess it is weird that its been night outside for two weeks yet we still say 'monDAY', I don't know man I just work here same as you let's grab some drinks"). In 350 years, the Martian Humans will declare independence and reject all forms of Timekeeping that Us Earthlings invented, including the one the ESA (hint: EUROPEAN space agency) tried to invent for them, because Politics. Can we just, I don't know, focus on GETTING to the moon first, before we start paying people to retrofit our microwaves with new clocks?
The real issue will be Mars since their days are approximately the same as Earth.
...and it will make other engineers rich when they dive into the complexity, wrap a clean API around it, and start a lucrative time-as-a-service company.