White House wants Moon to have its own time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT)
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Free Luna!
If we can't use UTC for whole universe, or even for the nearby solar system, should we rename it Coordinated Global or Earth Time (GTC or ETC) instead?
On a more serious note, Galactic Time probably won't be useful because relativity introduces too much irreconcilable error at that scale. We'll be back in the early days of the railroad when every station had their own clock, adjusted to local noon.
> TT is indirectly the basis of UTC, via International Atomic Time (TAI).
Nobody is going to bother renaming UTC at this point, misnomer or not. Besides, if they stop adding leap seconds to UTC (as is planned) the whole point of UTC goes away anyways.
From rough calculations, the time experienced on the surface of the Moon is 0.99999999999848 times the experienced on Earth
There was a video I watched that stated that in some situations 2 identical clocks that are in perfect working order, that if one of them was on a ship and doing certain things (that is purposefully vague since I don't remember) that if that ship came back to earth it would have a different time.
It is one of those things that really boggles my mind, even though it fascinates the hell out of me. If you have any resources to read or watch on this (the video I watched was space time I think) I would love it.
Not trying to be a dick, just not qualified to explain this myself
I'm also not a physicist, but read some popsci books in my youth like "A brief history of time" from Stephen Hawking (it's written for normal people). That's probably the best book you'd want. He later wrote a more modernized version called "a briefer history of time" as well. They both cover time dilation from a high level iirc. Of course, to truly understand you'd need to learn the math. I'm looking forward to doing that during retirement in a few decades.
"Does the Past Still Exist?" - https://youtu.be/GwzN5YwMzv0
Shit, I studied this for a whole semster in physics back in the day, and even back then I was constantly confused by it.
It is some unnaturally (to humans) weird stuff.
That's a totally wrong explanation but it helps me sort out the effects and what to expect. If you fly quickly around the Earth, your watch is a tiny bit different than the stationary clock.
But it's true.
edit: wait, if the Vector4.magnitude == 1, are dense objects actually just fast/hot?
For a deeper "why", see Feynman[1].
edit: it's related to how spacetime with a finite speed of light is represented mathematically. There's some discussion here[2] which might shed some light.
[1]: https://fs.blog/richard-feynman-on-why-questions/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time#In_cosmology
This sounds cool, but I don't think it has explanatory value. It's true that moving close to the speed of light will mess with your intuitions about the passage of time and give you things like the Twin Paradox. But there's nothing special about time there, it also makes things shorter by Fitzgerald contraction.
You can't be in the future, for example. The point of relativity is the equivalence of reference frames, it's not like the space traveller's clock is wrong and the stayhome's clock is correct, it's that humans who never travel at speeds close to the speed of light don't expect that two good clocks could ever disagree.
This is close to the main intuitions of special relativity as a geometric theory. I would phrase is more as "speed borrows space from time". In general relativity (and special relativity if you look at it geometrically) every reference frame moves at 1 second / second in their own coordinates, but an observer in a different frame will see you move in their coordinates -- the 4-vector of your time / position keeps the same magnitude, so since you are moving faster in space, your time is moving slower.
If time is constant, objects moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light break causality. They're moving fast enough that causality propagating the opposite direction of their velocity (things happening in the future) reach them faster than they should, and causality propagating in the same direction as them reaches them slower than it should (because they're moving away from it at a significant portion of the speed causality is approaching them at).
E.g. lets say there are 2 massive celestial bodies A and B. A is not moving at all, B is moving at 50% the speed of light. Let's say they pass close enough to gravitationally interact, but are half a light-year away from each other. Once they pass each other, causality from B will propagate to A at the speed of light, like normal. Causality seems fine.
But causality will propagate from A to B much, much slower because of the relative velocity. If B is 1 light-year away, it would actually take something like 1.3 years for causality to reach it. In other words, A is within B's causality radius (B can cause effects on A), but B is not within A's causality radius (or rather, it is when the event happens, but it won't be there by the time causality gets there). That's a problem for something like gravity. B's gravity can influence A, but A's gravity can't be the cause of events on B, because of the speed of causality. Thus the only valid event is B's gravity on A, accelerating A without decelerating B, meaning we would have actually created energy (at least until causality catches up).
To maintain causality, and preservation of energy, something has to happen to B such that A interacts with B at the same time B interacts with A. The answer is to make movement through time and movement through space inversely correlated. If B is moving fast enough that light takes 30% longer to get there, B's time has to slow down by the same amount so that causality can be simultaneous and not create energy.
Causality essentially requires movement through space and movement through time to add up to some constant. As movement through space increases, movement through time decreases and vice versa. It's basically a formula like (current speed/speed of light) + rate of passage of time = 1.
That's the underpinnings of the idea that FTL travel will allow time travel. If (current speed/speed of light) is greater than 1, the passage of time has to be negative or flowing backwards to maintain causality. I.e. you are moving so quickly that you can catch up to and interact with causality propagating through the universe.
Somewhere out on the edges of the universe, the causality of the meteor that killed the dinos is still propagating outwards. Perhaps if we could move fast enough to reach that wave of causality, we would be able to interact with it somehow. It's all theoretical, and hand-wavy, and trippy, but interesting in concept.
"Doing stuff" includes observing things because of the light travel distance, but also biological processes, which involve eg. electrons moving from one atom to another.
I didn't watched the linked video here (more relevant perhaps), but this was the one for me: https://youtu.be/Vitf8YaVXhc
The faster you 'move' through space, the more you have to 'borrow' from the time component of the vector to maintain a magnitude of C
That means your 'position in time' moves slower; and so for people who aren't moving as fast through space as you are, they appear to 'experience more time'
From the spacecraft's frame of reference, Earth's time is slower. From Earth's frame of reference, the spacecraft's time is slower. Both are right.
When we say that time is slower or faster on a spacecraft, the Moon, or an exoplanet of Christopher Nolan's, we are implicitly prefixing the statement with "From Earth's frame of reference..."
But a century of experimental and observational data proves that it is.
At this point it's generally just taken as a fact that the speed of light is constant for all observers. The explanation given above falls out as a direct mathematical consequence.
We know from observations that light moves at a constant speed, even when the observer is moving near the speed of light, and we know that this observation is true regardless of your frame of reference.
In order for physics to remain consistent while accounting for the constant speed of light, other things need to flex between the two reference frames: namely, time (time dilation) and length (Lorentz contraction).
While in the same medium, right?
The speed of light is a universal constant in a vacuum, like the vacuum of space. However, light can* slow down slightly when it passes through an absorbing medium, like water (225,000 kilometers per second = 140,000 miles per second) or glass (200,000 kilometers per second = 124,000 miles per second).*
https://www.space.com/15830-light-speed.html#section-speed-o...
For example, the speed of light in a medium is not the "speed limit" of things in the same medium, and particles in it can actually move faster than light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
In other words, the speed of light in vacuum plays a special role in both a vacuum and a medium.
Therein lies the rub. To "move" proves nothing about who is "faster" because there is no absolute frame of reference. You may think that I am moving at 0.8c, but maybe it is just me slowing down to a standstill while you are still receding at 0.8c. This might be a valid interpretation of your observation of me "moving at 0.8c" if... (and only if...) there were an absolute frame of reference. But there ain't.
AIUI it is the flavors of acceleration - including accelerating, decelerating, and gravity - that tinker with time. Which is why I still can't quite wrap my mind around the Twin Paradox, because it is usually explained in terms of speed, not periods of acceleration.
But it is true that nothing can ever be perceived as traveling faster than the speed of light. So how you can you travel billions of light years in a few decades, yet never be perceived as going faster than the speed of light - one light year per year? Simple - the universe, like a simulation filled with spaghetti code, starts to cheat, and changes the rate at which things start to move through time. An observer back on Earth would see your ship start to accelerate towards the speed of light, but then hit an insurmountable asymptote just before it.
So if you traveled a million light years, they would see your trip taking a million years. But by contrast, only about 26 years would pass for you. So if you traveled a million light years out in our 1g accelerating ship, and then a million light years back, it would take you 52 years, but 2 million years would have passed on Earth. There's a calculator for such trips here. [1] This whole effect is called time dilation. Gravitational time dilation is just a special case of general time dilation, and is essentially the time dilation factor driven by the velocity needed to escape the gravitational well created by a body. So - more massive objects result in greater time dilation. It leads to interesting things like the core of the Earth actually being younger than its surface!
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A clear way this can be seen in real life (and to also emphasize this is in no way whatsoever an optical illusion) is with particle accelerators. Many emergent or unstable particles tend to decay rapidly. Yet when we accelerate them to speeds near light, we end up being able to observe them for orders of magnitude longer than their decay when at rest. It's because of time dilation. From an at rest observer, time starts to move more slowly for something moving rapidly.
All of this should also be taken with a general 'for illustrative purposes' asterisk. I'm leaving out lots of things, like how as you approached the speed of light you'd start to experience length contraction. It's essentially another way that the universe cheats to ensure that everybody always perceives the speed of light as a constant.
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This has amusing and interesting social implications for Earth as well, if and when we become able of developing such technology - the rich and powerful, seeking immortality, will undoubtedly seek to thrust themselves into the future. Great setting for some sort of a sci-fi series, not only for those on Earth, but also for those setting out into a future that may not be exactly what they were hoping for.
Serious questions follow. How and using what technology? Why are we still struggling to go to the moon or Mars by taking weeks or months?
The concept that time is relative to the observer is where the theory of relativity gets its name from.
The easiest one to explain is probably the most mind-bending: wheter or not an event is "simultaneous" depends on the frame of reference.
You are sitting in a spaceship that has a large empty cargo bay. There is a lightbulb in the exact center of the cargo bay. If you turn the bulb on, it will hit the front and the rear of the cargo bay at the exact same time. This is true regardless of the speed the spaceship is traveling at (because the speed of light will always be measured as the same value).
Now think of what happens from the frame of reference of someone on a planet as the spaceship is passing by. Since the spaceship is moving forwards, and the light moves in both directions at the same speed, the light will hit the back of the cargo bay slightly before the light hits the front of the cargo bay. The faster the spaceship is moving, the bigger this difference.
This way, travelling to the future is pretty easy by the way. Just travel in a vehicle almost at the speed of light and the outside worlds time will move faster (relatively), since you are slowed down.
I'd much rather have SI be universal than our calendar.
The second is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency ∆ν, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1
I think the bigger calendar problem with space travel is the differences in the length of a day (or sol), as we know it's 24hrs on earth, Mars is 24h 37m (not sure about the moon since it's tidally locked its ~27x24hrs). The drift of days between Mars and Earth is going to be far more noticeable than a tiny fraction of a second due to relativity.
When people say "time runs slower" in a location, that means that time spent there subjectively feels longer than it really is in the outside world. "Time runs slower at the cabin, a weekend there makes the city and office life seem like a long-ago time and place."
That's the opposite of what happens in gravitational time dilation. You spend a subjective two hours in Gargantua and decades pass on the outside.
You'd probably want to avoid leap seconds and use TAI though, but we should avoid leap seconds anyway IMO.
There is no such thing as a universal frame of reference is the somewhat depressing outcome of Einstein's theories.
As far as we can tell any observer would come to similar conclusions about that reference frame would be. It’s just not a particularly useful reference.
If you want to stick to special relativity, the Andromeda paradox will show the problem with simultaneity with distance, and Einstein's train thought experiment about trains will show the problem of simultaneity with high speed.
The order of events, timing of events, and even causal structure of events are not fixed.
Even the Conventional Celestial Reference System is only quasi-inertial, only inertial like over small periods of time.
The incredible smoothness of the earth approximating a co-rotating frame with a high error tolerance is the only reason we can treat time as absolute on the surface of the Earth.
But to derive the new definition of the Kilogram requires lots of corrections as do modern atomic clocks.
Don't confuse the ability to choose a reference frame with the Newtonian concept of universal reference frames.
When making measurements SR is a framework that allows you to pick any reference frame that is convenient, but the speed of causality(light) prevents the existence of a universal reference frame.
Isn’t that like, speed of light or wavefront of event propagation in the universe isn’t consistent but unavoidably potato shaped - but if so, wouldn’t it be at least difficult to have multiple potatoes intersecting, or potato being shaped like Klein bottle? Self intersecting potato shaped space-time would be cool, though.
Really this is beyond typical human intuition and requires math, but here is a quick minutephysics video that quickly demonstrates fairly well it without me typing out a bunch of math that no one wants anyway.
You can calculate observed order of events for any reference frame from any reference frame. Thus they are fixed once everyone agrees to using a given reference frame.
It’s not much more complicated than seismic detectors recording the seismic waves from an earthquake at different times based on their location. Sure detector X see earthquakes in order A, B, C and detector Y sees them in order C, B, A they would both agree that detector Z should see them in order A, C, B based on it’s location, the timing of the events, and wave propitiation speeds.
It only seems unintuitive because you aren’t used to accounting for such issues.
For constant velocity motion in flat spacetime:
Δτ^2Δs^2 = c^2Δt^2-Δx^2-Δy^2-Δz^2
The spacetime interval is invariant, but notice it is also a scaler that combines space and time, and note that time is multiplied by c^2.
Also note Δt is the time as observed but an inertial observer that is present at both events.
You have three types of intervals here represented by one scaler.
Timelike: Δτ^2 > 0 Spacelike: Δτ^2 < 0 Lightlike: Δτ^2 = 0
In the case of Δτ^2 = 0, that is equivalent to an inertial observer that is present at both events at the same time. Which will seem to be simultaneous.
Δτ and Δt are practically the same in situations we commonly experience and an assumption of constant velocity motion in flat spacetime is usually accurate enough.
And will an assumption of constant velocity motion in flat spacetime, you can CHOOSE a Δτ that is 0.
There is no universal reference frame where Δτ =0.
More importantly your observations are of the past for distant observers, and don't have a universal concept of 'now' outside of the local case.
Mission Control on earth, a moon base, and mars would all experiencing time at a different rate and those rates would vary based on the orbits of each body. However assuming we needed extreme precision, such as telescope interferometry, people can pick one of them arbitrarily or perhaps due to politics some arbitrary 4th option. Whatever their choice everyone’s timelines based on that choice end up being absolutely identical.
The math simply works without any ambiguity. So because there’s an obvious choice based on the actual universe we live in, ie maximum amount of time since the Big Bang, then in theory trillions of civilizations across many different galaxies might all use the exact same reference even if no particle experienced it.
Edit: Well not exactly the same there’s uncertainty for such calculations but effectively the same.
Even though time runs faster on sattelites, and the signal delay differs based on position. Because the vectors of sattelites and the moon is constant, as well as the moons gravity, you could calculate what those offsets should be and synchronise clocks anyway.
To put it another way, you normalise the clock drift and the delay, whats left over is the same clock drift you'll need to account for when you have a quartz clock in your computer and a time server that runs an atomic clock.
The point being, clock drift can become a huge issue unless you define a specification that allows any equipment to sync up with any other clock in Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.
Relativity doesn't make time-keeping impossible. It just requires more clarity. UTC was implemented after Einstein passed away.
All for zero benefit because the Earth is variable number of minutes from Mars so there will always be variation. Mars day is different from Earth have to calculate Earth time anyway.
Which is exactly what OP was suggesting, everyone else went off on a tangent.
I wasn't suggesting we should have a true universal time, I was suggesting that we rename the mislabelled universal coordinated time that we already have to something else... :) )
That means everything happening is happening forever, all at once.
I guess if you live a shitty existence, then its infinitely shittier, but if not, its infinitely meh.
Guess it depends on how you look at it.
The problem is that on the moon, due to relativistic effects, a UTC second is not really a second, it is slightly longer, and that makes it inconvenient for conducting experiments on the moon. So for moon-based operations, moon time will be used, it can then be converted to UTC for "universal" operations.
It is not the first time we use different clocks. In fact, we already have plenty: UT0, UT1, TAI, etc... That's because the Earth rotation is not that great at timekeeping, atomic clocks do better, but we still want our days to be aligned with the sun, so depending on whether you are more interested in the Earth rotation or in precisely counting seconds, you will use different clocks, with UTC being a compromise you can always convert to. GPS time is one such example, it is a few seconds off UTC because it doesn't account for leap seconds.
All that is not even accounting for local (earth) time zones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation#:~....
No, why? Universal is already defined as referring to earth (the world). From the Oxford Languages dictionary:
u·ni·ver·sal – of, affecting, or done by all people or things in the world
Great, lunar time hasn’t even been established and we already have two time zones.
"It came about as a compromise between English and French speakers. - Coordinated Universal Time in English would normally be abbreviated CUT. - Temps Universel Coordonné in French would normally be abbreviated TUC.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Astronomical Union wished to minimize confusion and designated one single abbreviation for use in all languages.
UTC does not favor any particular language. In addition, the advantage of choosing UTC is that it is consistent with the abbreviation for Universal Time, UT"
So the reason it's called UTC is because the French and British couldn't agree, who could have guessed? :)
An interesting question is what the frame of reference for this time is - if the Moon's orbit changes significantly and the contraction factor changes, then this timezone shouldn't be adjusted - almost "de-pegging" it from Earth's time, right?
Apparently so!
https://www.ipses.com/eng/in-depth-analysis/standard-of-time...
It's also a non-issue for most applications since it's usually possible to figure out the current year with a precision of at least 9.8 years.
GPS wouldn't work without accounting for relativity, for example.
Unlike "sometimes a second is longer than a second" (not literally true but it makes some sense in the context of relativity), this one just seems like a tautology to me.
In other words, the only thing we can say without qualification is that a second is just a second in the same frame of reference. All other statements must be heavily qualified.
Even things like "A's second is longer than B's" are only valid in some frames of reference and not others.
In the twin paradox thought experiment, one of the twins really has aged slower than the other (or, from their point of view, the entire earth has aged faster than themselves).
In that sense, relativity has effects more tangible than distortion of observations across a large distance.
https://github.com/withinboredom/time
From the earth frame of reference, the lunar day is different than from a lunar frame of reference.
(this isn't my opinion on whether we'll end up following suit with UTC and so on, the article itself calls it "LCT", and "CLT" does not appear on the page at all)
One can imagine the standard would have to be revised many many times if humans became interplanetary.
I would prefer if IANA/Eggert were not involved on this one. They've already made an absolute mess of the Earth based timezone database.
> Would it just be "Space/Moon"?
More problematically, how would you define it's coordinates and country code, which are fields in the tzdb for each timezone?
Some marketing department must have been involved.
ETA: There is a minor relativistic issue due to the reduced gravity. If the figures I found online are correct, we are talking about 0.02 seconds per year. Surely such a small difference can just be "smeared" away periodically?
Once we get humans on the moon, they'll probably want their own time zones -- but in that case this solution still won't be enough, because they'll probably want the time to depend on their lunar longitude, just like it does on Earth.
Even if/when humans again walk on the moon it will just be a short trip and they will head back to earth (Likely China, but India is realistic, other countries that could realistically send someone to the moon don't seem very interested in trying) Their missions will be planed from Earth, and they will otherwise want to match earth time so they can contact people back on Earth.
If in the distance future we put colony on the moon, the people will drift apart from earth and so I expect the kids born on the moon will not care about earth time so much and may eventually demand a switch to moon time. OTOH, I think what they really want out of moon time (light cycles are too long to be useful humans) probably isn't what we think today.
Of course this would be very different for planets or solar systems far from Earth.
Although I guess an equilibrium will necessarily be reached after a sufficient amount of rock-throwing.
That said, interestingly, the quadratic nature of that problem (the earth slowing down progressively faster over time) means that the gap between when we have to care about my solution (because we accumulate too many leap seconds per lifetime) and the leap second solution (because you can only insert a little over 365 per year with the current protocol) is much smaller than the gap between now and when we would have to care about my solution.
If you're not too picky, the two solutions "expire" around the same time. The max rate of leap second insertion only admits an hour of drift per decade, which is slow enough that I still think most people wouldn't care, and they might like if our time handling is simple enough that we can't repeat the recent xz supply chain issue in hundreds of thousands of lines of increasingly complex datetime nonsense.
> the only corrections made on atomic clocks located on satellites are very small adjustments to ensure that they remain perfectly synchronized with atomic clocks installed on the Earth (usually to correct drifts due to relativistic effects).
this takes care of the effect mentioned in the article. However the more relevant (and debatable) question is if "Moon time" should also observe the leap seconds (which are introduced to account for variations in Earth's rotation, so have nothing to do with the Moon).
For all internal operations requiring high precision, they'd actually have to keep their own time reference (or calculate a dynamic offset from "GPS time") or they'd get unexpected results since the atomic clocks they carry run fast with regards to the SI definition of a second.
(It could be the other way around, i.e. the clocks running correctly with regards to the satellite's frame of reference and an offset being applied to the signal, but I suspect skewing clocks to fit the Earth-based frame is easier.)
> Additionally, the navigation accuracy a system can achieve with signals from multiple space-based assets, such as a person navigating on Earth with signals from Global Positioning System satellites, depends on the synchronization of those assets with each other. At the Moon, synchronizing each lunar asset with an Earth-based time standard is difficult — due to relativistic effects, events that appear simultaneous at the Earth (e.g., the start of a broadcast signal) are not simultaneous to an observer at the Moon.
...
> Precision applications such as spacecraft docking or landing will require greater accuracy than current methods allow
...
> Beyond these operational challenges, the direct use of UTC at the Moon (i.e., without correction) as the local time scale would have cascading effects for applications that require precise metrology. International System of Units (SI) core unit definitions, including the meter and kilogram, rely on the SI definition of time. Due to relativistic effects, a non-SI unit would introduce uncertainty in core unit definitions. These types of errors will have undesired impacts, such as reducing the accuracy of mapping and inertial navigation products
Isn't this true on Earth as well, just to a slightly lesser degree? Why are the synchronization mechanisms used to correct for drift in LEO suddenly unable to cope when used on Luna?
You have
- TAI: i.e. Atomic time which is basically the aggregate of a bunch of major atomic clocks to get as close as possible to "true time" on earh.
- UT: i.e. Universal Time on earth with the different UT0, UT1, etc providing different levels of correction based on where you are on earth.
- UTC: i.e. coordinated time that is the same anywhere on earth. This is derived from TAI but receives leap seconds when it is sufficiently out of sync from UT1.
- GPS time: i.e. the specific time standard kept on GPS satellites based on their orbit. This time is derived from UTC(UNSO) which is a specific UTC clock at the US Naval Observatory and the offsets are recorded by the satellites.
So you have your GPS time and your UTC time. What this proposal is doing is effectively the same thing. i.e. creating a new coordinated time standard for the moon (LTC) that tracks an offset of how far it's drifted from UTC so you can effectively coordinate. And eventually when the moon gets it's own GPS (which it will eventually), you'll have GPS(LTC), i.e. GPS time relative to LTC.
It even makes a voltmeter read incorrectly.
Moon-meters would be different from Earth-meters.
Careful.
That’s exactly what I want! takeMyMoney.jpg
If an independence movement on Luna gets hold, it might want to differentiate Luna from Earth, and introduce a "lunar foot" based on lunar people.
Kinda feels like agreement on the definition of the Newton would be the difference between "guidance and propulsion systems worked perfectly" and "debris was scattered across the landing zone".[1]
[1] Not an astrodynamicist, but have done enough problems with inclined planes, pulleys, springs etc to know it's quite important to get the magnitude of the forces right.
This would have required to apply a relativistic correction to the measured frequency of any atomic clock, but it would have provided unit definitions independent of the position in the Universe.
However, before contemplating the idea of time keeping on other celestial bodies it was decided to define the second based on an atomic clock that works on the surface of the geoid.
I believe that this was a big mistake, because it ties all the SI units to the Earth and especially because it does not really avoid the use of relativistic corrections. Now the precision of the atomic clocks is so great that for most of them it is necessary to apply relativistic corrections depending on the altitude of the laboratory.
Thus, it is impossible to perform the suggested procedure. We don't (and probably can't) know what zero potential looks like.
Furthermore, we would probably measure those potential differences using clocks that rely upon the SI as presently defined.
That's even less than leap seconds on earth, so for practical purposes, I suspect the two will be kept in sync somehow.
https://agamerica.com/blog/myth-vs-fact-daylight-saving-time...
>It is a common myth in the United States that DST was first implemented for the benefit of farmers.[38][39][40] In reality, farmers have been one of the strongest lobbying groups against DST since it was first implemented.[38][39][40] The factors that influence farming schedules, such as morning dew and dairy cattle's readiness to be milked, are ultimately dictated by the sun, so the clock change introduces unnecessary challenges.[38][40][41]
>DST was first implemented in the US with the Standard Time Act of 1918, a wartime measure for seven months during World War I in the interest of adding more daylight hours to conserve energy resources.[42][41] Year-round DST, or "War Time", was implemented again during World War II.[42] After the war, local jurisdictions were free to choose if and when to observe DST until the Uniform Time Act which standardized DST in 1966.[42][43] Permanent daylight saving time was enacted for the winter of 1974, but there were complaints of children going to school in the dark and working people commuting and starting their work day in pitch darkness during the winter, and it was repealed a year later.
Elon - renounce citizenship before blast-off!
I don't see how time on the lunar surface helps with that any more than time on Earth surface does...
i.e. CLT (which will probably end up being LTC for the same reason that UTC is neither TUC or CUT) replaces UTC for lunar operations and any putative lunar timezones would be offsets from that.
I initially read it as that, and didn't even blink. Elon's promises are so ridiculous and inept that being two years behind on building a ladder seems entirely plausible.
So it is beneficial to move computers there because they would make more computation per year.
Though 58.7us/day is ~21ms/year which is 6.8e-10, one needs a really big scale to make it meaningful.
GPS satellites already correct for this.
As an American, I did not expect my government to talk about relativity in a press release.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2024/04/02/whit...
I'm not sure why it didn't bother mentioning the Office of Science and Technology Policy. If I had realized that's where it came from, instead of from NASA, I wouldn't have mentioned it.
1. "Metonymy is a figure of speech where the name for one object or concept is substituted for another, related one (as in the White House for the US Government)" https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/metonymy-vs-synecdo...
Unless this was triggered by an executive order, which is kind of exceptional to the normal process.
Not executive order I don't think, but yes, from the White House's offices directly. This didn't originate from NASA administration.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Celest...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
In some abstract philosophical sense, perhaps, but that's different than a directive from an actual White House office, which this is.
> Unless this was triggered by an executive order, which is kind of exceptional to the normal process.
Policy directives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are also an exception to the normal NASA-internal decision-making process.
USG has something called the Executive Offices of the Presidency, that's included in "the White House". This is one of those councils, they're all hosted at whitehouse.gov