• idegenszavak
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    12 hours ago

    Shit programmers say…

    The problems of time zones only affect a handful of people, the wast majority of people nearly never think about this.

    Epoch or standard time would just rename time zones, beucause currently you say hour offset from London, with “no timezone” you would have to say something like, noon is at 05:00 utc/epoch at that city, so nothing really changed

    Industries where it actually matters already use UTC for everything, e.g. international flights.

    It would make more sense to switch to base 10 minutes and hours than to “solve” the time zones

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 hours ago

      Yeah, I’m not seriously suggesting this is something we should get on, lol. Maybe solve world hunger or just all the wars first before another radical standards reform.

      The difference would be that you would actually just schedule something for a megasecond out, instead of having to screw with timezones or reference the sun at all. It wouldn’t matter much locally, but for anything international - like probably this conversation - it would be easier. Even UTC has hard edges.

      If we seriously go into space it’s going to be really picking weird thinking in terms of the incommensurable days and years of a distant planet, at which a point it might not be just a trivial issue anymore.

      Would you redefine the second to make your decimal system work? We’ll need a new Epoch system then, haha. The French did try to do something like that.

      • idegenszavak
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        4 hours ago

        What would be easier with our conversation? I guess we are at the other side of the globe. I wasn’t answering because I was sleeping, you won’t answer immediately because you are sleeping, what would help if our clocked showed the same? Both of us sleep because the sun is down, not because the clock says something.

        With long range space travel we will have to deal with the relativity of time as well. Lets say we define an Epoch and both of us do something exactly a googol second later but we live on a different planet, it wouldn’t be at the same time because of relativity. If I would say lets do something when it is 12:00 in London, UK, Earth, than you can convert it to your relativity and time zone.

        About the intetplanetary usage of the current system, it’s already in effect, LTC aka Coordinated Lunar Time is already under development since this April.

        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-moon-will-get-its-own-time-zone-called-coordinated-lunar-time-under-nasas-lead-180984076/

        On the moon, a smaller body where the gravitational pull is much weaker, time moves more quickly and unevenly: Lunar time gains about 58.7 microseconds per day compared to Earth’s time, though even this can vary, depending on the altitude and longitude where lunar clocks may be located.

        “An atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth,” Kevin Coggins, manager of NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation Program, tells the Guardian’s Diana Ramirez-Simon. “It makes sense that when you go to another body, like the moon or Mars, that each one gets its own heartbeat.”

        So the solution is to just convert between time zones, and resync them sometime because they can drift because of relativity.

        I don’t know how a base 10 day would work, it just annoys me that its reform wasn’t successful with the metric system. But I don’t know how it will work when people will live on Mars. A day on Mars aka a Sol is 24 hours and 39 mins. Will they have “Mars hour” which equals 1 Earth hour and 1.6 Earth minutes? If not, they could simply use Earth hours, than it won’t be possible to create classic circular clocks.