Re:OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)
by swiley on Thursday April 01, 2021 @05:46PM
(#26666526)
Judging by DST and the gregorian calander I'm sure we'll end up with a system that doesn't even approach the utility of what you're thinking.
Everyone will probably just use Eastern Time on mars complete with Daylight saving, maybe TAI if we're lucky.
Re:OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)
by smitty1e on Thursday April 01, 2021 @04:55PM
(#26665893)
One anticipates a network that operates with a faster-than-light "because" pipe,
or you just have a planetary local NTP server and let something upstream do the Einsteinian gymnastics with the timestamps.
Re:OpenBSD Adds Support for Coordinated Mars Time (MTC)
by wahern on Thursday April 01, 2021 @05:38PM
(#26666431)
What's wrong w/ TCB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Coordinate_Time) and TDB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time)?
The answer we came up with was: thank god we'd be retired or dead by the time it became a problem that we had to deal with day to day.
You would need something like international atomic time to be the basis for it, but unlike TAI which is the weighted average of some 400 atomic clocks on the surface of the planet, you would need to define it with respect to free space (which we can't access) and with respect to a single event that's accessible to everyone yet human scaled enough that it happened in written history (the best we came up with was the first nuclear blast).
Then you would need to have a calculation that turned it into local time which would be completely decoupled from any actual time keeping. Think printing the result of a square root in Roman numerals vs trying to do the calculation in Roman numerals.
Unix epoch is laughably inadequate for anything like that. Basically we have nothing today and you'd need an international agreement to have a sane time keeping system going forwards.