Yeah, you can use an hour/day-based system elsewhere, but it’s goofy and has a lot of complications. If a separate culture were to grow up on the moon, they would start to wonder why their measurements are based on the particular natural rhythms of a place they’ve never been, except eventually out of sync completely.
We haven’t actually scheduled anything here, but if we were to I’d default to UTC like you said. The thing is, it’s just not as simple as a decimal count, and it has leap seconds, and there’s daylight savings and permanently changing timezones and physical relativity that can make it difficult to know what your current offset is. If we were to drop the requirement that the time has anything to do with the day/night cycle and the seasons, all that goes away.
The current system is definitely good enough, but it could be done better.
Yeah, you can use an hour/day-based system elsewhere, but it’s goofy and has a lot of complications. If a separate culture were to grow up on the moon, they would start to wonder why their measurements are based on the particular natural rhythms of a place they’ve never been, except eventually out of sync completely.
We haven’t actually scheduled anything here, but if we were to I’d default to UTC like you said. The thing is, it’s just not as simple as a decimal count, and it has leap seconds, and there’s daylight savings and permanently changing timezones and physical relativity that can make it difficult to know what your current offset is. If we were to drop the requirement that the time has anything to do with the day/night cycle and the seasons, all that goes away.
The current system is definitely good enough, but it could be done better.