Let's do some math! According to the SSH handshake described here[1], I believe there are 6 one-way trips. Given communication times according to this[2], we can average a one way trip to be about 11min.
6 trips x 11 min each:
That is 66min for the handshake.
It’s technically even more complicated than just scaling the day/seconds by to match a Martian sol. There are relativistic corrections that add up over time (Earth clocks would observe Mars clocks ticking at a different and non-constant rate). Good thing this is real :)
This is already the case on earth. UTC is defined at sea level and clocks run faster at higher elevations due to the lower gravitational redshift. This effect is easily observable with atomic clocks and has to be taken into account in any accurate clock comparison.
The design needed to accommodate leap seconds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUT1 due to planetary rotation adjustments, would be fun. So much of how we define time is rooted in the Suns movement.
to extend that to its logical conclusion, if you have full access to the hardware, many things are possible. so you've stolen a desktop computer and it has unbreakable full disk encryption, but you don't care about the data, you just want to use the computer? remove the M.2 NVME SSD and replace it with your own, install a new operating system.
or boot the thing from a dban ISO and wipe the SSD, re-use it.
Some in-show evidence that there may not be much variety in computing platforms is that several screens we see in different ships have the same graphical elements but have been localised to english and lang belta respectively.
Judging from our past several decades of network effects, I'd guess earth-origin operating systems will still dominate, with perhaps a long tail of poorly-adopted alternatives (as with, on the language side, BELTABOL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zTGjy9KeW4cqagXHlVDwKmcZ1mE... ).
without going into too much spoiler like detail, at one point a martian marine who presumably has admin access over the ship, gives an order to the ship to give the equivalent of root to everyone on board. presumably this would be like copying a dm-crypt/LUKS secret key or similar.
So, what you're saying is that 2307 is going to be the year of the OpenBSD Desktop? (on Mars at least, the Earthers probably use NetBSD and the Belters FreeBSD).
A time system useful on Mars needs additional consideration; considerations we haven't given it yet. It requires more thinking than just time zones. The various things we've sent to Mars haven't had any need for a colloquially time; they're computers, they just know that 21,872 seconds or whatever into the day is that far into an 87,755 second day and that's good enough to calculate shadow angles and expected solar panel efficiency from.
If we were to build a colony on Mars with normal people doing normal everyday things, we need something more than that. The first question we want to ask ourselves is, do we want to keep the SI defined second? If we don't care, then we have free reign to do whatever we want. We can define a Mars second to be 1/86,400th of a Mars day, and keep the 24 hour, 60 minute, 60 second time system we use on Earth. Or we switch to a metric time system, with a 10 hour day, 100 minute hours, 100 second minutes. Or a 1 day long day, and deci, ceni, milli, micro days. Or whatever.
If we want to keep SI compatibility, we need to keep the second. The Martian solar day is 87,755.224 seconds long. 87,755 factors into 5^2 * 53 * 67. So we can do 25 hours per day, 53 minutes per hour, 67 seconds per minute to give an 87,755 second day. Unfortunately there would need to be a leap second once every 4-5 days.
Then there's the question of the calendar. Perhaps fortunately, this gives us the opportunity to restart from scratch, because the calendar we use is such a goddamned clusterfuck, even worse than our time system. Unfortunately, the number of days in a Martian year (668 and change) does not lend itself to a clean division into tidy periods. You could have 23 months of 29 days each, with each month having 4 7 day weeks plus one holiday. This will give you a 667 day year. Add another annual holiday at the beginning of the year, plus an optional leap-holiday in the middle of the year.
Or you could split it up into 37 months of 3 weeks, each with 6 days. This gives you a 666 day year, so sprinkle in 2-3 bonus holidays per year.
There are a lot of considerations. It needs to be given more thought. Hopefully more thought than we've given to Earth's timekeeping systems.
> The first question we want to ask ourselves is, do we want to keep the SI defined second?
I think absolutely yes. Any Mars colony is going to import a lot of equipment and technology from Earth. All of that is going to assume the SI second. Not just for measuring time, but also as part of the definition of derived units such as newtons. Martian colonists will have no practical choice but to use the SI second since all their Earth-manufactured equipment is going to assume it.
Plus, if they tried to introduce a distinct Martian second, soon they'd have a mix of SI units (based on the SI second) and slightly different Martian units (based on the Martian second), and that would produce Mars Climate Orbiter style disasters.
> Perhaps fortunately, this gives us the opportunity to restart from scratch
People won't. People will want to use the Earth calendar because they are keeping in sync with Earth news and Earth culture. Maybe after a few centuries, Mars will feel sufficiently independent from Earth, that it might want to introduce a new calendar. However, by then Martians will be thoroughly used to the Earth calendar, it will be a centuries-old part of their Martian culture heritage, and they probably won't want to change it.
I agree that changing the definition of seconds would cause all kinds of problems. However, having local time and a local calendar that are synchronized with when the sun comes up and the seasons I think makes a lot of sense, and it won't take centuries to implement. It'll probably happen as soon as people arrive on Mars.
I like Kim Stanley Robinson's approach, as described in the Mars trilogy. They use standard seconds, but at 12:00 midnight, the clocks just stop for about 39 minutes. (Computers just use seconds-since-the-epoch or something and are unaffected.)
Martian colonies will still care about Earth calendars, but only to the extent that they have to deal with Earth. Kind of like dealing with a different timezone on Earth.
> However, having local time and a local calendar that are synchronized with when the sun comes up and the seasons I think makes a lot of sense
How important are the seasons going to be for people who have to spend the vast majority of their time indoors due to the lack of a breathable atmosphere – and possibly even underground for protection against radiation?
Maybe one day Mars will be terraformed and given a breathable atmosphere, and maybe even some kind of artificial magnetosphere can be created to protect against radiation. But that is going to take many centuries.
The fact is that modern societies don't really need a calendar synchronised to the seasons. Most jobs nowadays the seasons are not very important. This is especially true in parts of the world where the difference in weather between the seasons is less marked (like where I live, here it never snows in winter). Fields such as agriculture where seasons are important can always keep track of the seasons independently from the calendar, or using a special purpose agricultural calendar. In fact, that's what is traditionally done in much of the Islamic world – the Islamic calendar was used for most purposes, which is out of sync with the seasons. Those jobs for which seasons were important, such as farmers, also used a separate solar calendar. It was only in the 20th century that the need to participate in the global economy created pressure to use the Gregorian calendar instead.
> I like Kim Stanley Robinson's approach, as described in the Mars trilogy. They use standard seconds, but at 12:00 midnight, the clocks just stop for about 39 minutes
I don't know why you'd do that. On earth, clocks run from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 each day. On Mars, you'd just make them run to 24:39:34 instead. That way you can actually get precise times for events that occur in those extra 39 minutes and 35 seconds that happen each day. (Also, I'd hope people on Mars would be using 24 hour time–I'm one of those people who changes all their clocks to 24 hour time on Earth)
> Martian colonies will still care about Earth calendars, but only to the extent that they have to deal with Earth
For the first few decades at the very least, Martian colonies will be dealing with Earth an awful lot. A lot of goods will have to be imported from Earth. There will be a lot of focus on what they can locally manufacture on Mars, but they'll start with basic stuff like foodstuffs and simpler manufactured goods, and it will be a long time before Mars has leading-edge semiconductor fabs or a lot of other stuff like that.
There will also be continual immigration from Earth, and also people returning to Earth (whether temporarily or permanently). That's going to psychologically link them with Earth.
Martians are also going to consume a huge amount of cultural imports from Earth. You think on Mars they won't have Netflix, YouTube, etc? They'll replicate the content library into a Mars-based CDN and people will be watching it on Mars. It is going to take a long time before natively produced Martian media/entertainment content becomes more popular than the Earth-imported stuff. And I think that's going to tie Martians to Earth at least as much as trade ties and movement of people back and forth will. Martian colonies will undoubtedly develop some unique cultural aspects, but a huge amount of their culture is just going to be Earth imports.
> How important are the seasons going to be for people who have to spend the vast majority of their time indoors due to the lack of a breathable atmosphere – and possibly even underground for protection against radiation?
Quite important, actually. Day and night cycles determine when solar power is available. You'll probably have some outdoor activity by humans (mining, construction, maintenance, etc...) that would be affected by daylight. (Perhaps most work will actually be done at night to avoid radiation from the sun?) And even in a hardened habitat you might have skylights (maybe long tubes or solar collectors connected to fiber optic cables rather than big windows in the ceiling).
> The fact is that modern societies don't really need a calendar synchronised to the seasons. Most jobs nowadays the seasons are not very important.
I work an indoor job, but still the seasons affect me quite a lot. (It's cold and rainy in the winter.) I don't know what the seasons are like on Mars, but I could imagine outdoor seasonal differences in temperature and light levels could have some impact on colony logistics.
> For the first few decades at the very least, Martian colonies will be dealing with Earth an awful lot.
Sure, but if the lead time between ordering a part and receiving delivery is something like six months or a year, it's probably hard to care that much about what's going on on Earth in real time. Sort of like someone who runs a business that buys parts from vendors in China is probably aware of the Chinese New Year. But that doesn't mean they run their life primarily off of the traditional Chinese calendar.
> I don't know why you'd do that. On earth, clocks run from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 each day. On Mars, you'd just make them run to 24:39:34 instead.
Well, sure, that's the practical solution. But it's less poetic than having some interval every day where the accounting of time is put on hold.
> I could imagine outdoor seasonal differences in temperature and light levels could have some impact on colony logistics
The question is whether that's important enough to justify using as the primary calendar for everyday use. You can always have a "Mars seasons" app which displays current and future Mars seasonal information in terms of the Earth calendar, or in terms of some kind of hybrid Earth-Mars calendar (like my suggestion of using Mars sols but Earth years.)
I don't know how much the seasons would matter to a Martian colonist, but if you're on a planet lit by a day/night cycle that's approximately 24 hours, then you're most likely going to synchronize your sleep schedule to that, not the day/night cycle of some other planet you're not actually living on. That would be your day. And then from there the days and months get out of phase with Earth so you'd end up using your own calendar as well, at least for accounting days of the month. Using Earth months and years might be fine, though, as long as one accepts that the months are a few days shorter and so on; that seems reasonable. And "years" being a very specific chronological length are so well ingrained that you'd almost need to invent a new word for Mars years.
I personally think the most likely outcome is a hybrid calendar which combines the Martian sol, a 7-sol week, and the Earth year of approximately 355 sols. They might declare the the year to begin at the midnight Mars Coordinated Time which is closest to midnight UTC on 1 January on Earth.
I don't know what they'd do about months. I reckon the easiest thing to do them would be just not to use them, and use a week count instead. A lot of businesses on earth prefer to use week counts instead of months for planning anyway, so we already know that approach works. For medium-term planning, you can divide the sol-weeks of the Earth year into four quarters. (The Earth-year contains 50-51 sol-weeks, so that divides into quarters of 12-13 sol-weeks–some quarters would be 7 sols longer than others.)
We have months because there is a big celestial body close to our planet that helped humans track long-scale time since before any formalized time system, so we had to fit it in, but on Mars? Even though there are Phobos & Deimos (which orbit too fast for any similar long-scale time tracking practical purpose), how visible are they to a martian surface observer with unaided aye? I guess that indeed there probably won't be anything, or at least not something local for that time-scale.
The Martian orbit is quite elliptical relative to Earth. Sunlight during the perihelion months is 40% brighter than at aphelion. Not from the angle of Sun, like we worry about with Earth seasons, but the actual size of the Sun in the sky. Furthermore, dust storms are significantly more common during the brighter months.
Assuming the energy on a Martian colony would come from solar panels, a Martian colony would still need to care significantly about the seasons and time of day.
"a Martian colony would still need to care significantly about the seasons and time of day"
Sure, in most if not all of the places future humans may come to inhabit, the celestial bodies will obviously have a strong influence on their lives and so they'll have to care. But, as I see it, this is more like marking events in a tool-tracked independent time system instead of having the time system devised around what's happening with celestial bodies around them because they can't do any better.
For a person living on Mars it makes sense to align the time to Martian solar day iff their daily life is linked to outdoors activities in sun. However, if they are expected to stay indoors or even underground facilities (which IMHO is very, very likely at least for the first decades for various reasons) then the outdoors day is simply irrelevant, and it makes all sense to coordinate with Earth time for all your activities and just look up local solar time only when you need to schedule activity outside the base in the "wilderness" - where you're anyway going to spend just some hours, not a whle day/night cycle.
If we are to send people to Mars then presumably we want some interaction with the surface. Otherwise we might as well send those people to underground bunkers on Earth.
You will find no shortage of volunteers for Martian colonists, but understand that for anyone who just wants to be alive somewhere, there's an endless quantity of undesirable places on Earth in which to live that are all still veritable paradises compared to literally everywhere on Mars.
About the only practical benefit of a Martian colony is to serve as a last-ditch backup of human civilization in the event of an asteroid strike. Mars won't be a powerhouse of industry, commerce, or culture; at best there will be some modest scientific output. It's a tomb world.
Give humanity a few millennia to build a Dyson sphere around the sun and maybe then you could start reasonably terraforming Mars into somewhere intrinsically nice to live, over the course of a few additional tens of millennia.
> Mars won't be a powerhouse of industry, commerce, or culture; at best there will be some modest scientific output. It's a tomb world.
I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, the habitability sucks, but it does have plenty of natural resources. Combined with the low gravity, I suspect it could be a useful manufacturing and refueling hub, especially as a pit stop on the way to the outer planets.
That said, I think Ceres is a bit more viable for that, due to closer proximity to the asteroid belt (since it's in the asteroid belt) and due to it being a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons (water and hydrocarbons being pretty crucial for both refueling operations and human colonization). If the gravity on Ceres ends up being too low for human comfort, that just makes it easier to build centrifuge habitats, be it on the surface or in orbit.
Yeah, science outpost (in the spirit of Antarctica or ISS) is what I have in mind when I think of humans on on Mars. And the interactions are more likely to be remote controlling rovers on surface than doing surface ops themselves.
Days, months, and years based on the cycles of the planet make sense on Earth, but not as much on Mars.
Almost all Martian settlers will be living underground, and even aboveground the light at mid-day is extremely dim. You can set the day to whatever length you want, regardless of the Martian sol, and nobody will notice.
Likewise, months and years on Earth are for tracking agricultural seasons, but nobody will be growing crops on the Martian surface. Set the year to whatever you want, with or without months, and no civilians will notice.
I was about to argue that that seems pretty anemic for a best-case scenario, but it occurs to me that the lack of a substantial atmosphere probably means you do at least avoid any reduction in light as the sol goes on; Martian sunrise is therefore probably brighter than Earth sunrise.
Even still, being able to see the Martian sky means being exposed to radiation for which no intervening atmosphere or magnetosphere exists to protect you. I don't think this changes much about a Martian settler's unlikeliness to prefer to set their clocks according to solar time.
I'm almost certain it's a joke, the question is for how much longer? The crypto interoperability issues are amusing, thiugh I do seriously wonder how you deal with anything from a 10 to 40 minute round trip time.
The same way we deal with speed-of-light delay on earth: CDNs, asynchronous protocols like email, or just ignoring it when we can get away with it (e.g. "instant" messaging). SSH might be a bit tricky, but just pretend your system on mars is a production server and send it a tested bash file (using any of your favorite automation tools).
Something that doesn't rely on round trips for error correction, I guess. AFAIK bandwidth is limited but is overall less of an extreme constraint than the RTT. Seems like a good use for forward error correction / sending parity data, like Reed-Solomon.
It certainly does raise a forward thinking issue and that is networking across planets and TZ handling. TZ's are already a PITA what with leap seconds.
Then there is defining standards on Mars, 24hour days kinda not going to translate, so again, more forward thinking needed. As for Mars GPS, bit of a way off, but I'm sure the good old atomic clocks will work.
I guess the job title of "Systems Engineer of Time" may become a reality one day after all.
Kind of makes me wonder about local time on a space ship going some significant % of the speed of light. Time itself would be at a different rate than back home. Perhaps we need to introduce the concept of a space-time zone.
The most practical solution is probably to introduce a global time beacon, like a satellite broadcasting it's own time, or everyone counting the flashes of some known pulsar. Then you have one time reference everyone agrees on, it just ticks at different speeds depending on how fast you are moving.
Luckily so far the practical propulsion concepts we have max out around 10% the speed of light for reasonable amounts of propellant, so we have a couple decades left to figure this out.
Same here, this is so far the best one yet. Far better than VW's shitty attempt.
Though, it dawned on me, Mars could have real time zones. Not the stupid political mess we have today. Perfect, logical longitudinal time zones from the get go. That right there is more than enough reason for me to leave this planet.
But let's be honest, Mars will be colonized, politics will arise and the same fuckery will happen eventually.
When you're already destroying enough of the legacy timekeeping systems by switching to a planet without a 24 hour day, most of those arguments lack muster.
Also, don't call people out of the blue and expect them to pick up anyway. Maybe your uncle had to work late and is sleeping even though the sun is technically out.
Sure, but how do you list shop hours? How do you get a sense of what time of day your itinerary’s events will take place at, given they’re in a location far far away?
Because time is a social construct and humans have no business having any form of social norms or social rules. It's not like humans are social creatures. Abolish all the social constructs!
I know, it's the weirdest thing calling folks. People pretending like calling others with a phone is the purpose of them. Jeez, the audacity. Not following social rules of using a phone. People need to construct some socially agreed concepts to help cooperate with each other.
No, humans coordinate. The idea of dropping a tool of coordination because you think it's about the numbers and not the utility is a terrible argument. Yes Mars will not have a 24 hour day. That doesn't have a single thing to do with, "legacy timekeeping". Timekeeping was not built on the idea of a "24 hour day". Timekeeping is built on coordinating humans to accomplish things whether recreational or utilitarian. Right now, our best system is based on the arbitrary divisions of an Earth day cycle. The base features of seconds, minutes and hours work. The day length, which is only about 37 extra minutes, doesn't require a brand new system. Hell, an Earth day isn't a perfect 24 hours either. Drastically altering the system just because you're terrible at showing up on time for meetings is pretty dumb. Since Mars is going to be in tight communications with Earth, especially coordinating resources, why have drastically conflicting systems? People bitch enough if you only give imperial or metric measurements online, "Where's my favored unit of measurement? I can't convert it on my own!" You really think different methods of time keeping are going to work out well?
So no, my take on the argument was appropriate. Their stance was an absurd concept based in teenage destroy-the-system angst rather than taking reality as it is. If there's a truly better way of making sure two parties show up at the same "when", then let's hear it.
Coordinated Mars Time (MTC) is an actual thing [1]. The abbreviation follows from UTC, which is abbreviated that way because English speakers wanted CUT (coordinated universal time) and French speakers wanted TUC (temps universel coordonné), so we compromised on an abbreviation that works in neither language (I wish I was joking).
The commit going on to call the config TZ=MCT could totally be a typo that will persist for eternity, just like the "referer" header.
It mentions the days being longer, but what about the years? What even constitutes a year on Mars? Seems like more thought needs to go into how this would work if/when we become interplanetary. Assuming knowing where you are in the year has any value on Mars, we'd want some way to track that. I wonder also how this would work on the moon.
My background is physics and during an extended beer session my group talked extensively about what properties an interplanetary time keeping system would need to have.
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.
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.
Probably best to just drop the notion of "days", "years", etc. entirely, and instead just track the number of kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc. since the Unix Epoch.
In the novel "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, the characters tell time this way. I had to do some math early in the book to get a feel for what 1Msec & 1Gsec was.
In addition, they also keep track of their cold sleep time, because if you want to meet your spouse 50 years from now, you want to try and keep the same relative age.
I was under the impression that the OS did only track time in seconds since the epoch, and whenever you see something else it's just the software translating for human convenience. If that's the case, then it this doesn't really make sense; humans will want something friendlier than epoch time on Mars, too.
Sort of. Unix time does not count leap seconds, all days are 86400 seconds long in Unix time. So the actual number of seconds since the epoch is a bit larger than what time() returns.
I don't know how Windows deals with leap seconds (its epoch is in 1601 or something like that). Edit: it doesn't, the clock goes 1 second ahead of UTC and it's then fixed by NTP.
So time() is actually days since epoch with 1/86400 precision. That makes the Google solution to smear leap seconds with NTP instead of making them explicit make even more sense.
My sleep schedule has a ~25 hour period, so I'd actually use this. :) Been doing it for 20+ years. Most of 2021 I've awakened around 07:00 MTC. It's 10:27 as I write this, so I've been awake for about 3 (Mars) hours. http://marsclock.com/
Judging from the extant lang belta vocabulary, Belters are likely on an ISO week date calendar. They have 7 weekday names but don't seem to bother with our months, and they celebrate (a presumably earth calendar based) New Year. (calculating new years day relative to week 1 is probably for them the introductory CS equivalent of calculating easter for us. Seritenyidiye, "a 30-day", exists as a word for month, but probably refers to the earth concept, among those unlucky enough to have to interface with earth calendars.)
Beltalowda showxa ere tim wit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date
keya? Beltalowda tili du pati (wit walowda walowda dansa unte walowda walowda rowm unte da adewu "Piyat Minut"?) fo Yitim unte showxa ere Mundiye, Tusidiye, unte kopeng. Amash beltalowda na tenye wowt fo "months" tumang. Imalowda tu inya, tu "legacy", sasa ke?
They refer to time as shifts as well, presumably since work is so crucial. So it seems to imply the shifts are a regular length of time, so a "day" for a worker would be from the beginning of their shift to the beginning of their next shift. It's a little less clear with the Earth/Mars military.
It's easy to use 8 hours for a shift like we do (and 8 hours for sleep), but our shifts are based around day/night, sleep cycles, and our human limits for work within Earth's gravity. That could change on Mars though. Since there won't be weather seasons or agriculture for a long while, work shifts will likely have a bigger influence on the decision rather than the reasons we have them on Earth.
> It is currently not possible to use ssh to login between systems on MCT and any earth time zone