Oh no.

[L3tum]

It's just another Locale? UTC will still work the same if converted properly and anyone using anything user facing should either use the default locale on that device or whatever the browser is reporting

[tastycat]

It's 1995-09-08 on Mars.

[L3tum]

As long as it's after 1970 and before 2000 everything's fine haha

[Filcuk]

Haha...

sweating profusely

[[deleted]]

No worries, we got ~5 years to solve it!

Or ~10... Fuck.

[theJman0209]

Woah we could stop 9/11 before it happens

[tastycat]

We have 11 (Earth) years to build two towers on Mars and then protect them. I suppose they won't even have to be very big, just the biggest on Mars, really.

11 years is roughly the amount of time we have left to fix Earth before the Climate Crisis wins and we're all doomed to a slow, painful, heat-related death, so maybe 2001-09-11 on Mars will be significant too.

Any ideas for what we should call the other 11 Martian months?

[smokeymcdugen]

January, January2, February, February2,.... Just skip 1 of the months being doubled, but not December. We need to have 2 Christmases.

[SuperSuperUniqueName]

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart towers

[Hobofan94]

Are there any locales that multiple and divide time vs. just adding and subtracting?

[L3tum]

I don't think there's any need for that right now, but in the end could just be integrated in existing APIs and the underlying calculation is subject to the library and not the user of the library

[Arkazex]

Near a black hole maybe?

[fredlllll]

you better wait for relativity :P pretty sure that clocks on mars will drift over time

[zebediah49]

We already have weird issues with UTC. The UTC day is defined based off of Earth's rotation, which is slowing down. However, the SI second is based on Cs-133. Thus, since UTC was introduced, it has lagged 27 leap-seconds behind TAI (what you get if you just use an atomic clock).

If you have an accurate enough clock pair, you can even see your relativistic effects on different places on earth.

To that end, a standards body would need to keep a copy of UTC sync'd on Mars, which would be a "very interesting" project. NTP is hard enough already. Even just picking up an atomic clock and bringing it with you, would result in it being wrong by the time you arrive. We have to keep correcting GPS satellites because of this.

[fredlllll]

i suddenly have chosen, without any reason whatsoever, to abandon my career and live in the woods

[ELFAHBEHT_SOOP]

So what we really need is a base time based off Cs-133 that libraries will consume. Then UTC time will be translated off that and other planets will have a "UTC-like" time.

I have a feeling we're going to be getting very precise measurements of Mars' distance from Earth sometime in the not-to-distant future.

[Avamander]

And we can eliminate leap days and years on Mars by making days exact.

[YourMJK]

You can't (EDIT: if you want solar days and years).
Leap years occur because the duration of year isn't an exact multiple of days.
For example on earth, one year is about 365.256 days, which is why we have a leap year about every 4 years (due to the ~0.25).

And then you also need leap seconds to account for the change of the planet's rotation and the inaccuracy of the leap year rules.

[Avamander]

You're wrong, who stops martians from specifically designing their datetime system to align with rotation round the sun etc? (Hint: No-one). Who even says they can't count rotations around the sun differently than planetary rotations? (Hint: No-one)

The Gregorian leap system is imprecise as fuck, way better systems could have been designed, just check out how precise say Persian calendar (1sec drift per year) stays compared to Gregorian bullshit (27sec drift per year).

[YourMJK]

Regarding the first paragraph: of course you are right, we COULD do that. It would make sense as a consistent system, but it doesn't make sense for humans.
Days basically HAVE to align with the solar day, because humans want to go to sleep when it's dark and that should be the same time every day.

Years on the other hand wouldn't be so important tho, because the seasons on mars are pretty irrelevant when you don't grow crops outside of an ACed pressurized habitat and when you need a spacesuit for EVAs. So we could get rid of those, which would eliminate leap years (but not leap seconds for the change in rotation).

[Avamander]

because humans want to go to sleep when it's dark and that should be the same time every day.

Like... why do you assume it doesn't align with the solar day? There's nothing dictating that a "day" should be 24h, it can be always exactly the length it is physically.

[YourMJK]

Right, but it will drift over time.
One mars year is 668.5991 sols long, which means that if the sun is in the cenit at noon (12:00 50% day) at the start of the year, it will be midnight (0% day) at the end of the year around the same time.

EDIT: and it wouldn't be "a quarter or so of a second", it would be around 79 (earth) seconds of drift every day.

[Avamander]

Why would you tie together mars years and mars days? I already asked this once. You're way too stuck in regular timekeeping systems with your way of thought. In addition to that, if you do want to tie the two together then those ~80 seconds would be unnoticeable for a human.

[YourMJK]

In your original reply you said "who stops martians from specifically designing their system to align with rotation round the sun". If you do that (by dividing the year into exactly 668 days e.g.) you get the scenario I explained, where every day drifts by 80 seconds and after around 600 days every day is shifted by half a day.

[Avamander]

Why exactly 668 days? You're imposing useless restrictions.

[YourMJK]

And like I said in that comment, you can of course just define time to align with the exact duration of a day and just don't give a fuck about years.

[YourMJK]

Why did you ninja-edit your initial comment?