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Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

Having just gone through the daylight savings change here in Europe, I found this really fascinating: how __do__ you set up time for the moon where time, at least as we understand it, doesn't really exist?

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?

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GMT is a time zone used in Britain. It is no more special than any other. The standard is UTC.

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.

People's eyes glaze over when I rant about this. But yes, I fantasize about a world where you could say "let's set up a video call at 6" and there's no mental math when there's geographic distance involved.

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.

Some industries do this using UTC. For example flight departure and arrival times are in UTC on all paperwork. And also the meteo reports and forecasts, and airspace restrictions, and airport opening times etc.

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.

The biggest downside would be the date rolling over during a record-keeping period. But this is already a problem and people handle it just fine. I mean, we say "tonight" for 02:30 on the following day, so meh.

No no no. We can't make the world adjust to our crappy code.

24:00 is "mid night". 02:30 is not less 'tonight' than 21:30, assuming no DST.

> But this is already a problem and people handle it just fine. I mean, we say "tonight" for 02:30 on the following day, so meh.

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.

I'm willing to make that sacrifice if we can delete python's time zone library.

Swatch tried unsuccessfully to sell people on this idea back in the late 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

> If engineers were in charge, there would be no time zones

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.

Instead of time zones, we'd have variable customary times for meals. I call that a reduction in complexity.

You are just moving the complexity from your date widget to the user, who in the end probably is better of using a sun dial.

This is how it works in China. China has one time zone, so if you are in Xinjiang, you just go to work/school a bit later than if you are in Shanghai.

Only engineers that haven't thought this idea through: https://qntm.org/abolish

Fortunately they're not in charge.

> It's already the case that work-shifts span calendar days for many people

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.

I am extremely glad engineers are not in charge. Only an engineer (with a teeny-tiny dash of mid to high levels of egoism because of presumably how smart he thinks he is; the keyword being "thinks") thinks of humans as nothing else except extremely mechanical machines

Would time zones even be necessary on the Moon ? Sunrise and sunset occur on a scale of Earth days, not Earth hours.

Nope, no time zones. Just one time zone that is "the moon". But somebody somewhere needs to make a standard for that, and this is it.

Still tho, how about a prime meridian centered on where Neil Armstrong first set foot ?

They don't need any meridians. The entire place will be one zone. The time will be the same everywhere.

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?

> 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 ?

60 µs per day, not ms.

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