Of Time And Tide

Just a little sidetrack on the subject of clocks and calendars. More of an important issue than one might think. The martian year, one orbit of the sun, is 687 days, getting on for twice an Earth year. So using Earth year calendars in a colony would keep the seasons on Mars completely out of sync.. Not too much of a problem in itself because seasons move slowly and we adapt with them, and having one martian midsummer in say a March and the next two Januaries later would not be too hard to get used to. We are after all an adaptable species. But curiously it is the much smaller difference in Mars and Earth days that would cause the big problem. The Mars day, however measured, is roughly 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. So if colonists tried to use the Earth day, to keep calendars aligned, they would find their clocks useless for regulating their own activities. Despite the relatively small difference, colonists would find themselves waking in the middle of the night or going to bed in, say, the middle of the afternoon, indeed at a whole range of different Mars local times as the months wore on. Matching your sleeping patterns with the cycle of day and night tends to be important for longer term mental health, so it takes very little thought to realise that Mars just cannot realistically use Earth days to order its affairs. This has follow-on implications for the whole calendar. There really is no point in trying to stick to Earth months, or years, if days are out of sync (think about it).

So Mars will need its own months, maybe 12, or more logically, 24. And its own years. Perhaps year one on Mars could start at the winter solstice in the planet's northern hemisphere prior to the first landing of colonists. That sounds neat enough. But this should not lead you to think I am trying to suggest that humans should drop their allegiance to traditional modes of thought and religious calendrical importance. I think colonists would get used to a dual system of time and clock hours (computers make this easy). Birthdays of Earth bound relatives, festivals and traditional holy days could still be kept on Christian, Jewish, Islamic or Chinese calendars etc. It might be strange to have Ramadan start at 2 am Mars local time or Christmas midnight mass to occur in mid afternoon; but we humans have got used to worse things!