Mars Needs Leap Days Too

Re:Mars Needs Leap Days Too by skizm on Monday March 02, 2020 @06:30PM (#22470253)

I assume there are people at NASA / SpaceX/ etc. in charge of writing custom MarsDate modules for various languages. Sounds horrible. I'm not even sure we've solved how to deal with dates on earth yet.

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Re:Mars Needs Leap Days Too by peterburkimsher on Monday March 02, 2020 @10:41PM (#22471596)

We haven't figured out how to deal with time on Earth yet!

https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

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Re:Mars Needs Leap Days Too by ShinTakuya on Monday March 02, 2020 @06:54PM (#22470425)

I'd be more interested to see if a more generalised PlanetDate module could be written. Perhaps outside of Earth we could do away with months and just stick to days (based on rotations, assuming the planet rotates) and years, with leap days added in between? And if the planet doesn't rotate, just count by hours and years (with hours having a logical separator at 10 or 100)?

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Re:Mars Needs Leap Days Too by dahfizz on Monday March 02, 2020 @07:01PM (#22470461)

I think any interplanetary civilization will be practically forced to use a planet-agnostic time system - a true UTC

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Re:Mars Needs Leap Days Too by wahern on Monday March 02, 2020 @07:40PM (#22470708)

That'd be TCB--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Coordinate_Time

But we'd need a different standard if we colonized planets outside our solar system.

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Re:Mars Needs Leap Days Too by dehrmann on Monday March 02, 2020 @11:57PM (#22471907)

You also have to somehow synchronize second counters in a way that accounts for relativistic effects.

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