Earth's moon is getting its own time zone

Oblig. Video

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This is not about creating a time zone, but a time standard. That 58-ish microseconds per day relativistic difference in time is the entire reason for the project. UTC is based on International Atomic Time, which is an average reading of hundreds of atomic clocks placed around the surface of the Earth. LTC will have to be based on the readings of atomic clocks on the surface of the Moon in order to establish a consensus standard in that relativistic frame of reference. For practical reasons, the system will also have to keep track of offsets from UTC so that any given timestamp could be converted between UTC and LTC in a standardized way. The same principle could be applied to other planets and moons if needed.

As noted in the Celestial Time Standardization memo, having a time standard that is accurate to your frame of reference is useful if you want to have something like GPS navigation, or to calibrate instruments that rely on the definition of the SI second, e.g. a laser range finder:

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More detailed article here: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/30/science/lunar-time-zone-scale-nasa-artemis-scn/index.html - covers the atomic vs crystal and time-zone issues that I didn’t post yesterday.

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China can’t build a submarine that floats, so “No thanks!” on that one :laughing:

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One thing that I appreciated on Babylon 5 but was very rarely brought up in Star Trek is the fact that time zones exist and you really should take that into consideration before calling people up. But I like to think that Robot Chicken’s explanation is the right one: they just have a night shift that has their own series of adventures.

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the night shift existed on tng. usually data was the senior officer on the bridge for those

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man, i scrolled all the way down to find that.
not disappoint.

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… there would be less confusion about these things if the scientific time unit was not supposed to also coincidentally be a specific fraction of a solar day

They should really define an S.I. “moment” (or something) as exactly 10¹⁰ cesium transitions and stop talking about “seconds” at all :thinking:

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Since you’d have to redefine the derived units too, maybe we can just call them Avoirdupois seconds, hertz, newtons, joules, and so on to prevent any confusion.

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… the most annoying part of the metric system is having to learn French :face_with_monocle:

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But that’s essentially how it works right now. The SI second is defined as some arbitrary number of state transitions of a cesium atom. The arbitrary number was originally chosen because it aligned with a fraction of a solar day, but nobody is changing the arbitrary number to account for the changing rotation of the Earth. That part of the problem is handled by the UTC, which keeps atomic time (as measured by TAI) synchronized with astronomical time by occasionally inserting leap seconds, so that us mortals may continue to pretend that our clocks and calendars accurately describe natural cycles.

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We shouldn’t even be talking about scientific time and human clock time in the same conversation

Measuring them in the same units leads to all kinds of unnecessary confusion :face_with_spiral_eyes:

There is no non-confusing way to address all time-keeping needs in modern society.

Keeping to “human clock time” might work if you’re fine with having a sun dial as your only time-keeping device. If you want mechanical or electronic clocks, you need to define a standard of time that is not directly derived from astronomical cycles, and then you have to contend with the fact that those astronomical cycles don’t actually have constant duration. You may argue that the differences are too small for humans to worry about, but humans want to have fast transportation with predictable timetables, complex machinery with fast moving parts, and telecommunications that run on nanosecond-scale timers, which all require high-precision, i.e. “scientific”, standards. That’s something we get for free with the atomic definition of a second. If “scientific moment” and “human second” were separate units, people and devices would constantly need to do conversions between the two, which would be plenty confusing.

For further information about how all time-keeping is doomed to be confusing, see:

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That’s what Planck time is for. A nice, entirely scientific unit of time, without worrying about whether humans can use it for anything.

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series 10 tardis GIF

February Revolution = O.S. 23 February-3 March 1917 = N.S. 8–16 March 1917

October Revolution = O.S. 25 October 1917 = N.S. 7 November 1917

Continue with all Russian Dates until 14 February 1918.

Now do that everywhere in the world at the same time, and watch the chaos.

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