• Morphit
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    4 months ago

    doesn’t change

    Citation needed.

    Do you use leap seconds to stay in sync with earth’s rotation? When would they be applied? How would spacefarers be notified of these updates?

    Also, what meridian do you choose for this ‘universal’ time? Is it still Greenwich? Because that’s peak colonial baggage.

    • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 months ago

      peak colonial baggage

      I get the thought, but wouldn’t changing it just end up performative?

      I think changing the date system from AD/BC to CE/BCE is peak performative, and that’s coming from me as an atheist. We still use the same years based on the mistaken belief of when the Christ was born.

      Where would we change UTC to be? Best place I could think of is where the current International date line is in the middle of the Pacific but that area is already a clusterfuck of zig zagging not that current UTC 0 is much better. And then, what do we call it? Do we keep UTC because it was a compromise between English and French speakers? Should we go with Mandarin Chinese since that is the most widely spoken language natively in the world? But there is plenty of colonialism within Chinese history of the Han people versus all other Chinese ethnicities and languages. Or English because it is the most widely spoken language when adding first and additionally spoken languages (definitely colonialism there)?

      I’d sincerely love to know your thoughts on this. I’ve pondered it before and couldn’t come up with a good change besides using an artificially made language like Esperanto but that comes with a whole host of other issues.

      • Morphit
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        4 months ago

        wouldn’t changing it just end up performative

        Exactly. Sidereal time does get rid of time zones and leap years, but it’s still referenced to a single physical object and relies on a arbitrary choice of start point. So it doesn’t create some perfect cosmic time standard.

        The international date line doesn’t help since that’s just 180° offset from Greenwich itself.

        The point of standards is that they can be followed by everyone. The AD/BC epoch is fine. The Greenwich meridian is fine. UTC is fine. Changing them would cause so much disruption that it cannot be worth it.

        Daylight savings can go die in a ditch though.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      I meant doesn’t change with respect to time zones. Leap times are still relevant in that scenario as each solar rotation doesn’t divide into a whole number of days and leap seconds due to variance in rotation.

      With respect to the meridian I envision it rotating around the earth once per year, hence sidereal. So 0000 would rotate around the earth through the course of the year. Each day it would be one degree farther.

      Most likely is I’m just completely full of shit.