White House directs NASA to create time standard for the moon
reuters.com
reuters.com
Until we have FTL, that isn't physically possible. If we do, GMT comes with backwards compatibility.
I salute maintainers of timezone libraries. This is going to be a fun one. You are now responsible for space and time.
Apparently, TAI specifically defines the second (in terms of cesium transitions) at sea level (where gravitational potential is equal). I never knew that second part.
I'm sure that, starting from scratch on Earth, we'd probably come up with a system of time zones that is broadly similar to what we have today but with some new zones and some adapted zones. Then again, maybe we'd find a way to change things up altogether - is there any value to GMT being based on Greenwich if the UK is not the global power it once was?
The problem is that the time there will move very slightly differently than here on earth, because of the lower gravity, to the tune of 60 ms per day. That's almost a second every two weeks.
So the question isn't "what time do we set the clocks to?" but "what time will it be an hour from now?" Have a leap-second every few weeks?
Well, we have the software ready for it.
And yes, a prime meridian is not necessary, but NASA loves to name things. How about the Wright-Gagarin-Armstrong Meridian ?
If engineers were in charge, there would be no time zones. Brits would get up at 08:00, Indians at 04:00, and Americans at 12:00/13:00/14:00 depending on location. Shops would set their opening hours relative to local sunrise. It's already the case that work-shifts span calendar days for many people, and that franchise locations have differing hours of business, and that fuckwits telephone you when you're trying to sleep.
Biggest downside I can think of, apart from the entire population groaning about making the switch, would be the confusion from reading literature from the before times. Oh, and all blood, sweat, and tears of all the devs who created timezone code going down the drain.
Mostly out of a necessity that fights tend to cross timezones and planes come and go from all over the world and they don't want to have to figure out everywhere what the local time is.
Really only passenger info screens convert to local time.
24:00 is "mid night". 02:30 is not less 'tonight' than 21:30, assuming no DST.
Because that only affects the comparatively small number of people awake respectively events happening at that time of day. If you move the calendar date change right into the middle of the waking hours of almost everybody else, things get quite a bit more annoying.
We might not specifically have time zones, but we'd have something that is equivalent.
We live on an approximately spherical world, its rotation is not tidal locked to its star, its rotational axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, we evolved to synchronize our biological rhythms including our sleep/wake cycle to local sunrise and sunset, we occupy a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, and we need to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us.
That puts a lower limit on the complexity of our time keeping system.
Fortunately they're not in charge.
They're still only a small minority a people, though. (In Germany for example ~5 % of people regularly work night shifts.)
Without timezones, in locations further away from the meridian a far larger number of people will suddenly be impacted. Having the calendar day change smack in the middle of waking hours of most people is rather annoying.
Why would anyone bother following the US standard for lunar time? They can't even work out the metric system.
Ah yes. It appears that the French have already seized control of the appellation process. Except that French media are reporting it as "le temps lunaire coordonné" (TLC?). So the White House seems to be (somewhat blindly?) reproducing the oddity of how "UTC" (with the letters in that order) isn't quite "Universal Coordinated Time".
It's all arbitrary anyway. Just pick something that makes sense. UTC, UTC+1 (ESA), UTC-6 (Houston), whatever.
Because (according to the article) an earth clock when moved to the moon wold be a few micro seconds per day slower then it was on earth, causing drift.
So just setting UTC or UTC+1 isn't the ting they're trying to decide. It's more about a scientific method to derive highly accurate time on the moon, which can't just be earth type atomic clocks because they would drift.
Do you know how to make a microsecond on the moon? No, you do not. No one does. NASA has been assigned to figure it out.
Do you have any evidence that they're more "different" than Earth "local microseconds" versus moon "local microseconds"?