It's time to mentally prepare yourselves for this

No different than any other project the PM/PO team cooks up. Tons of work for no user base.

Why... why is the world like this?
- Because the world is seen and directed by layers upon layers of abstractions that get divorced from reality but do give monetary benefits when manipulated in some way.
- Our sorrow, despondency, and terror are their sustenance.
Not true, space agencies will use it... once.
- until they lose a multi billion dollar mission because of conversion errors

Watch Tom Scott descend into insanity discussing time zones

Based on a completely superficial review there are three almost guaranteed ways to become unhinged; studying infinities, refactoring legacy code, and working with timezones.
- I think it's time for a refactor of my legacy code that deals with infinite timezones. :/
- I had to refactor legacy date/time code (including timezone code) at work. D:
Lmao I love how he just gets more and more flabbergasted throughout the whole video. Truly an accurate depiction of dealing with timezones (which I'm unfortunately dealing with right now!)

We've gone too far. Everyone just switch to UTC please. Yes, it means some will go to bed at 2pm and get up at 10pm, so what.

go to bed at 2pm and get up at 10pm
While we are making reasonable demands, stop using 12 hour time. Sincerely, everyone else.
- And please, get all countries to actually start properly accepting ISO 8601 format for dates as a mandatory universal standard...
  Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/1179/
No
- Obviously it would require some getting used to, but already people can't comprehend time zones, so that won't change. My grandma called in the middle of the night all throughout our three year stay in Australia.
- Lol.
  None of the negatives that this troll article name are actual negatives that normal humans have.
Why switch? It's not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it's intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that's why we make the computers do the tricky work.
- Personally, I think it's just easier. Yes, computers and stuff, but we've perverted local time long ago with DST and country spanning single time zones, so might as well use one global zone and get rid of the confusion altogether.
I'm just saying, but we did.
Pretty much every electronic thing you own that resembles a computer (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, even your damned TV) uses UTC. Every. Single. One. Translates that time to "local" whenever it needs to.
So when your TV goes from 9:32 to 9:33, is just showing the converted time from UTC each time.
Almost every device on the planet is keeping time in UTC.
Just because you don't see UTC time on your device, doesn't mean that's not what's happening. I had an issue where I needed to get into my computer's bios for something, as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was "wrong" because it was in UTC. I'm sure plenty of newer BIOS dialogs are configured to account for timezones now, so yeah. I might be unique in this. It's still there.
- Almost all computers count time as seconds from the epoch (midnight 1/1/1970). That then gets converted into a readable time, which may go through UTC to be converted first, but that's not how it's storing it.
- But would the moon work on a 24 hour system at all?
  I can’t believe I just typed that as a serious comment
  Didn’t Bajor have a 28 hour day? I’m now voting for Universal Bajoran Time
If it makes a dev’s life easier there’s no reason not to upend half the planet.
- In Europe we've been talking about ending DST for years now and it hinges on countries deciding which zone they want to adopt permanently. Why can't they decide? Because the notion of getting up at six and having lunch at 12 is stronger than the cosmic fact of the sun being in the middle of the sky. We just need to decide how we want daylight to fit into that grind.
  I say fuck that. If we can't decide, don't. Since we're changing everything anyway, going to UTC will force everyone to think how THEY want to live their lives. When to open stores, whether to move opening hours in winter or summer, when to go to work (both early birds and night owls are great).
  Plus in today's globalized world, 14:00 will be 14:00 everywhere. You decide for yourself if you're working then or not if somebody sends a meeting request halfway across the world.
Because it makes getting an intuitive sense of what solar time it is somewhere harder.
Can I call my grandma in a different country? Hmm what time is average midnight there. Okay 8 (so far, same thing as looking up a timezone), and it's 18:00 now, so 10 hours after midnight, which is like my 23:00. Needlessly complicated with extra steps for the average person.
Sure, you can say, I'll call you X and that will mean the same thing everywhere, but does not have any information about solar time. And these days, it's automatically converted if you use a calendar (which you should). This is the point of programming, to make the USERS life easier, not the dev. The end is more important than the means, I think we can agree.
Or: what time is it where my grandma is? Okay, cool, I have a sense of what that is immediately after knowing the answer.
There are reasons we do things this way. Working roughly to solar times has more benefits than being able to say a time and it mean the same moment everywhere.
I say we leave things the way they are, works okay.
- Like when i find a recipe that measures volume in Cups, weight in Stones and temperature i Fucks?
- Just ask once what time is midday, and do some math
Those that propose moving to UTC should take responsibility and take the +12h offset. Why should we let the brits enjoy +0 offset while the rest of the world got the short end of the stick (especially those living in the pacific)?

That's it, I'm only using epoch from now on, that's enough of your time zone shenanigans

Except the length of a second is different on the moon because of relativity. So even utc is wrong.
- UTC doesn't become wrong, you can either just accept a different pace of the clock, i.e. earth ppl will be ever so late to a meeting or it's just a different kind of timezone conversion. Better would be to have a single time based on the reference frame of the center of the galaxy and everyone keep there time relative to that.
So, in this case a moon timezone, and more generally a "space timekeeping framework" makes sense because time actually moves at a different speed on the moon, so epoch times wouldn't actually stay in sync.
If the goal of "time" is to make it easier to reason about simultaneous things, then space makes that way more complicated.
It's just tricky to condense that into a headline that conveys the point.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11150
- The concept of “simultaneous” breaks down over relativistic distances too so that’s equally fucked

All we need is a single universal Space-Time map that will tell the time (in any and all formats) at any point in space, taking into consideration, all the events caused by all the forces that cause existence, from the start of this universe. Then it can take the place of both, maps and clocks.

Just make sure it is memory safe. Oh and properly escape all queries. And also ...

That should last us until we start exploring the space outside the universe.

Nah dog, its gonna be UTC. End of story.

if anything it should be stardate as the united federation of planets agreed to

The proposed time zone is to drift about 1 second every 50 years. I also suspect it wouldn't really be a time zone in the same sense as the time zones we know - it would just be a standardised calibration reference. Dates and times expressed in "moon time" would probably just be some leap second off of a known Earth time zone, and because it's mere seconds over centuries, I think the only use of this time zone is to calculate ultra-precise time diffs between two earth datetimes when the observer is on the moon. At least, that's how I interpret the articles I can find about it.

It's also important for things like GPS, as related to other planets, as well as orbital maneuvering.
What they're actually being told to build is "write down the rules for moon time", which is basically what you said but defined in terms of "this much faster than earth time", and a system doing the same thing on other planets or places in the solar system.
So it's less a timezone and more a time system, and instructions for how you calibrate your atomic clock on the moon and reconcile the difference with terrestrial clocks.

So, I read something on this a little while ago. It has to do with the moon's weaker gravity making time progress at a different rate, so the lunar time zone gives a precise reference for sub-second (nanosecond I guess?) precision manoeuvres and such like.

Anyone else keep nearly everything set to UTC?

In the military that’s all we used. It’s called Zulu time in the Army and it makes for coordinating events in multiple time zones fairly easy. I would assume the moon would be the same since there will 100% be a moon base with military.

Sure, we can compromise; they can have their own timezone, but it has a constant time value.

const moonTime = DateTime.Utc.MoonTime

As in, it is perpetually 4:20 PM on the moon?
- To the moon 🚀 🚀 🚀
- nice.

It's own timezone? It'll need it's own clock. A moon day is about 28 Earth days.

std::chrono::neutronstar_clock
How long is a moon year?
- If a year is how long it takes to go around the sun then a Moon year is the same as Earth's

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

Shouldn't the moon have… 24 time zones as well, depending where on the moon you currently are?

No, the moon's rotation isn't on a 24-hour cycle. I'm not a astronomer, but I pretty sure since it's tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I'm not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (but I'm pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth).
Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.
- It's pretty simple, actually. The time zones are on average 1 hour apart. So there should be about 24*28=672 time zones on the Moon. SIMPLE.
- Yep, relativity accounts for a difference of like 50ms drift per earth day. I would assume that it's forward drifting if you're on earth but backwards if you're on the moon.
  Take that, timezone whiners!
The moon's day length is so long that it wouldn't make any sense for any crewed mission to use it, they're going to need their own lights on an arbitrary 24 hour cycle anyway, so there's no reason not to have every future crewed mission there use the same one

I say we compromise we will take the moon but they must give up daylight savings. it's only fair.

Adds moonlight savings

Can't believe the US is putting trains on the moon before making them viable on Earth

No link to the article in the picture?

Also, wouldn't it just be simple enough to make the Moon GMT, and be done with it?

i still think timezones were a mistake, and that they shouldn't existed period. I have a long thread about this from an earlier post about timezones as well amusingly enough.

As a social construct, I like that I can be anywhere in the world and know that around noon is probably an appropriate time for lunch, etc.
- Time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so.
- Unless you're in Tibet, Xinjiang, or another place observing UTC+8 with a significant offset from local solar time.
- there is no appropriate time for lunch. And besides you wanna know a better way to figure it out? Go outside.
Imagine you're watching a movie, and the main character turns over to their bedside clock and it shows 4:13 am. With time zones we all understand what part of the day that is and instinctively can relate to the situation.
Without timezones, every locality would have a different shorthand and cultural understanding of what times mean what. Or they'd adopt a second system that helps transcend that but that's just inventing timezones again...
- I reluctantly agree with you. Though I think the reluctance is just because there's something in me that's viscerally offended by the concept of time itself (probably the ADHD)
Are you thinking about daylight savings time? I'd agree there, but timezones absolutely make sense, and we've always used some version of it. "See you at noon" has a sort of built in timezone, as does sunrise and sunset. We (all human societies) relate hours to the day in a similar, albeit more regular way. If you did away with timezones, you'd replace a minor inconvenience with a monstrous one. Everyone uses what, GMT? Naah
- DST definitely isn't helping, but in my experience, DST only makes this stuff more arbitrary, between the winter and the summer here where i live, the sunset can vary up to about 4 hours based on season. Time is entirely arbitrary in relation to the sun to begin with. It's a lived experience that many of us have.
  And while we do use things like morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, and midnight. Those are all relative to the local solar time, not the actual time. Sure noon being at 12 is kind of nice i guess. But noon is noon, the time on the clock doesn't change that.
I like it when i miss the train because town A's time is way off from toen C's time
Time zones are fine. Daylight Savings Time needs to be taken out behind the wood shed and killed with a spoon.
Username checks out.