when we start living on other planets:

- all date time libraries are going to have to be rewritten
- timezones will require you to specify what planet you're on
- will have to include / account for potential transmission delays between planets
- what will be the UTC for interplanetary comms - prob earth

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

Agreed

Latency going from a matter of nanoseconds, microseconds -> minutes, hours, days, or even worse, years

Is going to fundamentally change a lot of accepted truths around distributed systems, CS - currently all very earth centric (and rightfully so)

"distributed systems engineer" is about to take a whole different meaning.

"oh your 'distributed' system runs on Earth only? that's cute"

Bitcoin works great on earth

But what happens when you have light minutes, hours, light years between nodes / miners - consensus starts to take a long time

Founder & CEO at Renfter.com - Uncollateralized NFT Renting Protocol

Like handling date time without interplanetary hustle isn't painful enough 😂

Known for the everywhere.computer (/ec), /unglish (unglish.co.uk), the /secure-design WG, WalletUncon, Causal Islands + drumming in all-genre power trios.

Supporting “in between planets” is probably a universal timezone in and of itself - maybe you’d be on earth time

Position is a separate issue but relatively solvable - harder to do with the Sun though when we leave our solar system, Im sure there are other ways I don’t know about to track position

Probably gotta think broader. “Not on a planet right now” needs to be supported.

Bet we’re all watching solar activity very closely at that point. And we’ll know our own position relative to the sun at any point. Maybe the solution is somewhere in there.

Might also need to take into account special relativity time dilation.

For the sake of simplicity, everything will probably be indexed to the reference frame of the UNIX epoch timestamp on Earth.

Here's a PDF explaining the current implementation of time sync in deep space and on Mars: https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/45061/10-0908_A1b.pdf?sequence=1

I mean it's called universal coordinated time for a reason

Amazing 🤯

Of all the things about becoming multiplanetory I love thinking about date time libraries 

And while we are at it, can we all finally align to metric system? 😂

Likely earth will be used as reference

Kinda like how the width of cars correspond to the width of horse carriages

Previous designs will become reference points unless they’re not very useful in a new context

Wow imagine a interstellar time library, that would be painful to maintain.

Will things get more metric ey or more imperial hyper local systems with multi planetary systems?

I’d bet actually the latter rather than something super rational barring the invention of instantaneous ansible like tech

Blockchains are fundamentally time chains. Maybe everything will be relative to block numbers. Then the problem may then be reduced to how interplanetary consensus works.
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