Post #4769227 · Elektrine

2026-09-19 10:26 UTC

TIL: one Martian year is roughly a week short of one million minutes. So a sensible Martian time unit to sync Martian time with Earth time might be the kilominute (16.67 hours), given that the Martian day is roughly 24.5 hours … A decakilominute (10,000 minutes) is of course 1 hour and 20 minutes short of a week, so a MUCH CLOSER match for Martian time than using Earth/Mars days (7 Earth days fall 3h30m short of 7 Mars days).

Replies (1)

@dashdsrdash@tilde.zone 2026-09-19 10:52

@cstross@wandering.shop But minutes are terrible to work with; the Babylonian obsession with base 60 is outdated. Can we go with accumulated seconds since some benchmark in a specific frame of reference? 100 seconds to the metric minute -- bonus: "I'll be with you in a minute" now 25% more likely to be correctish. 1 kilosecond is the time it takes to do anything non-trivial, so it is a reasonable unit for estimating how long something should take. 30 kiloseconds is a working day or a good night's sleep. Those are all the timescales that people need to deal with shorter than a day, and everyone reaches for a calculator if they need to turn minutes or hours into days anyway. Keep the seconds, redefine the minutes and drop the hours, that's my take.

Open ##4769225