“[…] instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC).”
You people just hate acronyms that make sense, don’t you
stardates here we come!
Makes you realize how UTC is not really universal but bound to the earth.
Of course. But there is no reason Lunar time couldn’t be kept as UTC.
It all has to do with how we perceive time and humans are notoriously bad at it (most people seem to hate the idea that 12pm could mean middle of the night…they must have 12pm equal to sun high in the sky).
For the moon, though, the only issue would be with how UTC is calculated on the surface of Earth, which will have a time offset to play in with respect to the moon, in order to keep in sync with Earth-UTC (similar to how electronic satellites like GPS have to calculate).
You could but you would need to redefine the second, no? I mean time runs slower on the Earth than the moon, so yes you could synchronise the moon to UTC but then one second of UTC goes by on the Earth but 1.0…01 second actually goes by on the Moon.
Unless you kept syncing up your clock, you’d soon find that Earth’s 13:42 is actually your 13:43.
Yes, I said this in my post. Satellites do it, there’s no reason it can’t be done on the moon as well to keep in sync with Earth UTC. It’s math and physics — a problem that has already been solved.
At least we won’t have any dang countries forcing time zones there to be in odd shapes.
Just wait until every country’s base uses its own capital’s time. The time zones won’t even be in vague order around the moon like they generally are on earth but distributed randomly based on whatever country has the biggest base in the area.
Worse, if different countries bases and teams are using different home time zones than you don’t even have time zones. Two people from different countries in the same room could be different time zones, purely based on the country they work for.
If this fails and everyone with a space program can’t agree to just use the same standard, then time zones could get very, very bad in the future.
How do they handle this on ISS
ISS operates under the assumption that it is in GMT.
As a software developer, the last thing I want to see is another obscure timezone to deal with. It does seem like it’d be important to set a standard here though, and it’s unlikely to affect most software engineers anyway unless we start seeing colonization at some point.
Also, in general, I can’t imagine how relativity will work with this kind of timezone conversion.
Relativity is exactly the problem, time runs at a different speed on the moon. I have no idea how this is supposed to be handled in software.
Like if you have a lunar instant of time and an earth time and you want to figure out how much time happened between those two instants, I guess you’ll essentially need to decide on a frame of reference and then take into account relativity as you convert the lunar time to UTC. But I’m not a physicist, I’m not sure if doing that even makes sense.
