[bartvk]

>should include a timestamp. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline.

This was one of the ideas in the General Semantics philisophy. You don't much hear about it nowadays, it's a pre-war thing. One of the tenants was that you should date expressions. For example, if referring to a person, you'd write "Roosevelt, 1930" because a year later, Roosevelt may behave like a different person altogether.

[bradrn]

Apologies for the pedantic complaint, but tenets are not the same as tenants!

[cxr]

That's called time-binding, and it actually predates Korzybski's coining "general semantics" in the 1930s. He wrote about it in his first book Manhood of Humanity, which is public domain[2].

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_binding>

2. <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL168124W/Manhood_of_humanity?...>

[dom96]

That's a nice idea. I can think of at least one person that this would be useful for (Elon Musk, 2023).

[orthoxerox]

You need timestamps with time zone to track Elon.

[contravariant]

Maybe we should even use terrestrial time, just in case.

[orthoxerox]

Space colonization is going to be a pain. We've just managed to get sensible datetime APIs with instants and zoned timestamps, but they only work when time is the same everywhere. As soon as relativity comes into play we'll have to come up with a different approach.

[midasuni]

Nothing in the solar system has a relative speed different enough to earth to make common timestamps different - the difference is well below leap second impacts.

As for simultaneity we already have to deal with that at the millisecond level. An event logged at 16:00:01.000 as far as LA is concerned maybe logged at 16:00:01.080 in London, or maybe at 16:00:00.920

[contravariant]

I mean the clocks on different planets do tick at slightly rates. It's somewhere on the order of milliseconds per year, except for really large planets, but it does add up

[ianburrell]

Space travel will be relatively easy since requires computers. Everyone will keep track of their local clock in seconds. Then they will calculate clock for places they care about, eg Earth-time, since those are pretty predictable. Relativistic corrections will be pretty minor.

My guess is that planets will keep local day-year. Mars is close enough to Earth that throwing in extra 37 min might make sense. OTOH, most planets and moon might use Earth calendar because local day cycle is too far off human internal clocks.

They will calculate time for other places, but will be less important than time zones since every communication will have light speed lag. No video calls, but lots of email.

[MRtecno98]

Relativity is the least of your concerns when different planets have different length "hours"

[midasuni]

All planets (in the same plane of relativity) agree on the length of a second. The length of a day varies - both on earth and on mars, and is meaningless for people in orbit, but a second is a second.

[btown]

He’s just trying to get us used to how important it is to account for communication latency in aerospace engineering!

[doriss]

I think we'd better refer to month level, cuz (Elon 2023.11) change faster. :)

[Cthulhu_]

Tweets often have full timestamps and most of his best known statements are on there, lol

[namarie]

I'd honestly track his statements down to the second.

[Cthulhu_]

Donny Trump, who contradicts himself on the regular.