It's time to mentally prepare yourselves for this

The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 1436 points –
254

You are viewing a single comment

Shouldn't it have its own time system? And have its own time zones? You can't give the moon its own single time zone (unless you're into the idea of a single universal time zone).

That's actually what they're doing. The reporting said timezone when the actual order is more about time standards.

They're creating coordinated lunar time, as a complement to coordinated universal time, so it's a different time system with details about how it relates to UTC.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Celestial-Time-Standardization-Policy.pdf

Timezones on the moon don't serve as much function, because the day/night cycle is closer to a month long, and doesn't map to human rhythms at all. In a hypothetical where we have moon colonies on opposite sides of the moon, there's no reason for them to not still have synchronized day/night, since it already has no relation to the movement of the sun in the lunar sky.

There's not really a difference between 0 timezones and 1 timezone, let's split it and go with 1/2 timezones