Since you would only last at most a few (Earth) hours on the surface of Venus even with the best protection before your environment inevitably overheats, the question is purely academic.
Stranger
I think we can all agree that Martians should use the Martian day, and the same second as Earthlings. This then means that either 60 second minutes, or 60 minute hours, must give way. Pick one of those to change, and then you have to decide whether the extra time is distributed uniformly, or all clumped together.
That is to say, there are four basic choices:
1: Every Martian minute is 61.54 seconds long (and there are still 60 minutes per hour).
2: Ordinary Martian minutes are 60 minutes, and there are 60 minutes per hour, but one minute each hour is 152.48 seconds long.
3: Every Martian minute is 60 seconds, but there are 61.54 minutes in each Martian hour (but still 24 hours in a day)
4: Every Martian minute is 60 seconds, and ordinary Martian hours are 60 minutes, but one hour per day has an extra 37 minutes.
How about Europa? :>
”Attempt no landing there.”
Stranger
So if we just crash into it, that’s cool, right?
- Martian sols have 25 hours, and “hour” 25 will be 37 minutes long. Their clocks will go 23:58, 23:59, 24:00, 24:01 … 24:36, 00:00, and it’s a brand new sol. They’ll ditch the old AM/PM wording. They’ll probably get used to understanding that any time they see AM/PM it must be referring to a time on Earth.
It seems there will come a time when cycles are no longer based on Earth time, or really any celestial object’s time.
Mars is close enough to Earth that it seems as though an effort could be made to kinda sync their clocks, mostly for the comfort of humans who are used to around a 24 hour sleep cycle, but really, if anyone lives on Mars, they are likely to very rarely see the surface.
Seems as though any other place you go in the solar system will either keep to Earth time for convenience and compatibility, or form their own universal time. If Mar creates its own time to match the day/night cycle, it will likely be the only one on it, while everyone else adopts a move widespread system.
The genuine time-keeping challenge will be for the colonists on Titan. Will the difference between day and night even be readily discernable?
Overall I like your decomposition of the problem. But there’s another variable category:
or 24 hours in a Martian day must give way.
Springboarding from here …
I’ve never favored a lumpy calendar or clock system that needs to stutter-step frequently to align with the planetary motion. That way lies madness. Earth’s current standard for clock time works well enough[1]. OTOH, the Earth standard calendar sucks donkey netherparts.
As a matter of terminology I would propose using different terms than “hours”, “weeks”, etc. for the Mars-centric timekeeping system to reduce the possibility of confusion with Earth units. My terms “M-hours”, “M-minutes”, “M-weeks”, etc., below are placeholders for those new terms until they’re invented.
Having set the stage …
I think I’d back up one more level than did the esteemed @Chronos. Rounded to the nearest SI second there are 86,400 SI seconds in an Earth synodic day at the current epoch. Which we conveniently divide as 60 × 60 × 24[2].
Rounded to the nearest SI second there are 88,776 SI seconds in a Mars synodic day at the current epoch. That sorta inconvenient number prime factorizes as 23 × 34 × 137. Removing the exponents that’s 8 × 81 × 137.
Perhaps more promisingly we can rearrange that into 18 × 36 × 137. So 18 M-hours composed of 36 M-minutes composed of 137 SI seconds each. That could of course be reversed to be 36 M-hours composed of 18 M-minutes composed of 137 SI seconds each. For style points I prefer my first formulation, but others’ taste may differ.
Moving from the clock to the calendar …
Rounded to the nearest M-day, the Martian year is 759 M-days long. Which prime factorizes as 3 × 11 × 23. Which pretty naturally gives us 11 M-days per M-week, 3 M-weeks per M-month, and 23 M-months per M-year. Unlike the messy Earth calendar this means every M-month has the same number of M-days, and all M-months always start on the same M-day of the M-week, both this M-year and every M-year. Handy that.
Like Earth, Mars will need leap SI seconds to handle the odd fraction of an SI second per synodic day and Mars’ slowly changing rotation period. And they’ll need leap M-days every so often to handle the small fraction of an M-day left over at the end of every M-year. By my reckoning it’ll take about 50 M-years to accumulate 1 M-day of calendar error and then they’ll need a M-leap day to resync the calendar to the planet’s orbit.
[1] Setting aside the horrific current definition of the SI second needed to retcon scientific rigor into our standard time reckoning from the pre-scientific era.
[2] Conveniently that is if you like sexagesimal counting.
Yes, it is. Though sunsets will probably not be that exciting, as the sky s-l-o-w-l-y darkens behind the smog. Better use a clock.
Overall I think you’ve nailed it, setting aside inter-rock politics.
Before the advent of near lightspeed travel, TAI works perfectly wonderfully everywhere in the solar system. The real underlying meat of which is a count of SI seconds from a fixed epoch/origin. It’s all conversions and tweaks after that to make that into an Earth-centric time (UTC) that tracks Earth’s idiosyncratic orbital parameters. Which in turn is then converted to civil calendar dates and days of weeks then further subdivided into local time by time zones, DST and all the rest of that familiar civil time paraphernalia.
For folks in artificial habitats, whether ships, orbiting stations, or under a dense atmosphere, ocean, or underground, the idea that time has anything to do with seasons, apsides, perihelions, natural light, or anything else is silly. Whether of the body they’re on or of Earth. All that really matters is that the local equivalent of a “day” align pretty well with the natural circadian rhythm of whichever species is living there.
So their calendars may just be day numbers from the TAI epoch and their clocks may be hours, minutes, and seconds from TAI “midnight” which is simply one particular second transition occurring every 86,400 SI seconds.
I think you selected the wrong adjective there. I’d’ve gone with venusian.
“Venereal” is 100% technically correct. But it leaves a bad taste in some people’s mouths.
oh, now, you are just being mercurial
Let us remain jovial and never martial or saturnine. Even if some days I feel plutonian and more than a bit lunatic.
What about that Carson Napier guy? Also known as Wrong Way Napier, since his ship was launched towards Mars, but he crash landed on Venus. All kinds of human like people there, kingdoms, jungles, all kinds of stuff. No overheating at all with all those oceans. You must be confused and thinking of a different planet.
I wouldn’t know, can you describe the taste for those of us unfamiliar with it?
Thanks to everyone for a great thread. I had never given this any real thought, and you folks supplied a lot of info on different ideas.
Tastes pus-y rather than pu***.
You know what? I probably didn’t really want to know that, but they say any knowledge is good knowledge.
You’re welcome. 