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Comment by Galacta7 | Hacker News Reader

> For now, a moon mission runs on the time of the country that is operating the spacecraft.

Even more confusing since most spacefaring nations span across multiple time zones. Getting a lunar time zone that everyone can theoretically follow seems like a practical idea. It'll be interesting to see how this works on Mars, which would need to have its own planetary time zones (if there aren't already).

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Timezones are a practical construct for humans. I'm not sure Mars needs its own planetary time zones until humans are living on it - I don't know what purpose it would otherwise serve.

Come on, even Earth doesn't need timezones.

So You Want Continuous Time Zones [0] ? Or maybe you want to abolish them entirely [1] ?

[0] https://qntm.org/continuous

[1] https://qntm.org/abolish

The solution is obviously Swatch Internet Time.

Abolish them entirely. Your second link is silly and is not a serious counterargument.

It's just as valid as a non-silly post.

If you get rid of time zones, people will replace them with an ad hoc system that does most of the same things but worse. The current implementation could be improved some, but time zones in general are close to the least worst option.

I think having a unified time everywhere is a really obvious advantage. Time being measured differently based on geographic location is completely silly. You would still need to look up how a different location is scheduled but you also need to do that with timezones so there's no disadvantage, only an advantage.

We do have a unified time everywhere, UTC.

Putting time zones on top means people have to look up less.

UTC is effectively a timezone.

Putting tomezones on top means people have to look up more.

Please explain how you would do unified time without UTC?

I would use UTC of course. Why would you do anything else?

Then I don't understand what point you were making when you said "UTC is effectively a timezone."

But if it was notably more convenient, I would expect to see more people using it right now, even when it's not the default.

It's a matter of compatibility, e.g. you're not going to start measuring length in meters when everyone else in your country is using feet. That's why I said UTC is a time zone, nobody uses it outside of the UTC time zone, therefore nobody uses it outside of the UTC time zone.

I mean each city used to have their own time zone and we got rid of that.

The next step is to just get rid of the country-sized timezones. Sure the sun doesn't rise in US West as US East at the same time but it also doesn't rise at the same time in Florida as it does in Maine.

Those links have many falsehoods like claiming that UTC is a time zone. UTC±00:00 or Z is, but not UTC; "Continuous Time Zones" is self-contradictory.

The Earth doesn’t need them? But wasn’t the concept of a time zone invented because someone was always late to the train station and it was leaving him behind? We would at least need one giant time zone with an international date line.

It was needed for running railroads but the issue was a bit more important than being late for your train and missing it. When you are running trains in opposite directions on the same track it is pretty important to have your clocks well synced so you don't have head-on collisions.

Having your clocks well synced is not enough to stop collisions.

Relativistic drift would be a thing over long distances and times.

Mars rover engineers already work on Mars local time interestingly enough. So right now there's functionally as many Mars time zones as there are current missions on the planet.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-scientists-live-work-mars...

Not just humans - if you have multiple agencies with multiple assets that need to interact then you need to agree on a common time.

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