Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 20, 2024

Oddly, .25 seconds is about as long as you’d survive on the surface of Venus.

I believe I read that Pluto has not made one complete orbit since being discovered. Close to 248 years.

To state the obvious, Caulfield would have an extra hour most days if he would stop asking Mrs Olsen rhetorical questions.

The average length of a Martian sidereal day is 24 h 37 m 22.663 s (88,642.663 seconds based on SI units), and the length of its solar day is 24 h 39 m 35.244 s (88,775.244 seconds). 3 The corresponding values for Earth are currently 23 h 56 m 4.0916 s and 24 h 00 m 00.002 s, respectively… (Wikipedia)

By Caulfield’s rule, minutes and seconds on Mars would be longer than earth minutes and seconds. This would not matter if there were no communication between the planets, but is a problem when there is.

I suppose that if we can trust AIs to handle little details like that it would not cause strain, except for those who physically travel between worlds. But for the time being, Mars will use earth seconds, minutes and hours…

Interestingly, Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) had colonists use a 24 hour earth day, which left them with that 39+ minutes that more or less fell between “days”

Caulfield has a point, but not the one he made. Even on Earth, there’s nothing magical about dividing the day into 24 hours, in fact, it’s fairly arbitrary and based on the ancient Babylonian culture. Life since then would have been far simpler if they had chosen a decimal system of ten-hour days, hundred-minute hours, and hundred-second minutes. None of the time systems even now completely align with the actual (and slowing) rotation of the Earth without the periodic insertion of leap-years and leap-seconds. But base-10 is a whole lot easier to compute in your head.

He’d have a lot more seconds. The second is defined to be a fixed length of time so it wouldn’t change no matter where he was.

Now you all know what it’s like raising an engineer. Thinking outside the box, but the box has 1/8" thick walls so inside the box is really less space than outside the box because no one measures the inside of the box from the inside.

A day on Venus is longer than its year. Not that you would survive even an earth day on the surface of Venus with its extreme temperature and atmospheric pressure.

Scotty, take us out, no intelligent life here…

He has a point. Clocks – and the uniformity they impose – are fairly recent. The length of a sun hour changes every day, but there are always 12.

There’s plenty of SF where locals use their own calendar / length of days but also use a universal based one so that every colony/ship etc have a common value (usually Earth based but also atomic clock). As demonstrated by the measurement mismatches that were the reason for Mars Climate orbiter crash, speaking the same scientific language is necessary.

The SI-Base is a second. All other units will be a part or multitude from there, define or call it whatever you want. If it is lacking uniformity because it is depending on the relation of moving objects it isn’t a „unit“ no matter how practical it’s use is.

All labels are arbitrary. The universe doesn’t care how we measure what it does.

A day on the moon (the local period of light and dark) is our month, and a month on the moon (the light and dark period of the visible neighbor) is our day.

I’m thinking that a planet with multiple moons would see synchronized phases for all of them (understanding that not all may be visible at the same time), but I haven’t really thought it all the way through…

60 seconds on mars will pass by slightly quicker than on Earth because Mars has less gravity, so time will pass ever so slightly faster. Atomic clocks on the two planets will “tick” at different rates.

Hour, in timekeeping, 3,600 seconds, now defined in terms of radiation emitted from atoms of the element cesium under specified conditions.

“If we had this talk on Venus it wouldn’t have lasted a quarter second.”

If that’s how long you would remain alive, you wouldn’t be able to have the conversation.

If that’s meant to be the equivalent fraction of a “day”, Frazz has it totally backward. The equivalent fraction of a Venusian day (243 Earth days) is slightly over 4 Earth hours.

It’s all relative.

Maybe go metric right here on earth, switching to a 25 hour day would hardly even be noticed

And then there’s Lamuella.

More importantly, nobody’s been to Mars yet, and it’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to live comfortably there.

If you’re just gonna make up new time durations, I vote for 10 Martian hours per day, 100 Martian minutes per hour, and 100 Martian seconds per Martian hour. That way a second is almost the same on Earth and Mars. While you’re at it, you should probably balance and decimalize the entire calendar: a Martian year is almost exactly 2*7*7*7 days long, so it could be 98 seven-day weeks divided into 14 7-week months with a spare day at the end that everyone gets off to be hungover.

Caulfield calls baloney, and he’s right. His theory is pure nonsense.

to pick one: “I wouldn’t get 25 earth hours on Mars, I’d get 24 Mars hours.” Which is correct, because 24 Mars hours equal 25 Earth hours. They don’t, but we’ll accept Frazz’s precondition for the sake of argument.

This is actually true — not only are there Mars days, but there are Mars hours as well. The mission planners for Mars surface missions depend on this because it’s absolutely essential to maximize use of daylight – and for that, it’s crucial to know what fraction of a solar day has elapsed. JPL has even commissioned special wristwatches that run on Mars time and issues them to their teams to wear alongside their normal Earth watches, so they know what time to report to work. After all, if they want to get the most out of the mission, what time the sun rises in Pasedena, CA really isn’t important. What matters is what time it rises in Jezero Crater, or Gale Crater, or wherever.

If this had been any kid but Caulfield, Frazz’s advice for gaining an extra hour would be to give up an hour of TV/video games.

If an hour is 1/24th of a day, then a day is necessarily 24 hours. But, if you start from this definition of a “second”:

The second […] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.

which is independent of planetary bodies, then you could possibly adjust the number of seconds per minute and hours for different worlds and keep the system in place.