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Mars

Adjusting To a Martian Day More Difficult Than Expected 135

schwit1 writes: Research and actual experience have found that adjusting to the slightly longer Martian day is not as easy as you would think. "If you're on Mars, or at least work by a Mars clock, you have to figure out how to put up with the exhausting challenge of those extra 40 minutes. To be exact, the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn't coincide with the human body's natural rhythms. Scientists, Mars rover drivers, and everyone else in the space community call the Martian day a "sol" to differentiate it from an Earth day. While it doesn't seem like a big difference, that extra time adds up pretty quickly. It's like heading west by two time zones every three days. Call it 'rocket lag.'"
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Adjusting To a Martian Day More Difficult Than Expected

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:10PM (#49148811)

    ...and keep all the lighting on a 24 hour cycle. All the drawings I see of colonies on the moon or Mars all have buildings on the surface. Don't they both have cave systems? Just seal those off and who cares about the outside climate/seasons?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:15PM (#49148839)
      What every basement-dweller already knows.
      • What every basement-dweller already knows.

        Why not make a base on Daimos or Phobos? They should be easy to dwell into, and you could start rotate them for extra gravity.

    • A good idea, especially since the Moon has a two-week rotation. (by the way, many early drawings of lunar colonies did have underground living featured prominently. There was even a (IMHO dumb) idea to use nuclear weapons to carve out the caves with.

      That all said, I think your body (or at least mind) would be in for a shock if you stepped outside on midnight colony time to see the sun high in the sky. But then, folks who live within the Arctic Circle have to put up with seasonal day/night cycle shifts that

      • by pr0fessor ( 1940368 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:31PM (#49148997)

        I think the biggest problem would be those on the mars days are here on earth and all the life around them is moving on the regular earth cycle... I can't have lunch at my favorite restaurant, go to the bank, etc... because my days are out of sync. Those people in the Arctic Circle are all on the same clock as businesses and everyone else around them.

        • I think the biggest problem would be those on the mars days are here on earth and all the life around them is moving on the regular earth cycle... I can't have lunch at my favorite restaurant, go to the bank, etc... because my days are out of sync. Those people in the Arctic Circle are all on the same clock as businesses and everyone else around them.

          i don't think it's going to be the martian day cycle that keeps the first people on Mars from getting to the bank or their favorite restaurant for lunch.

          • Right but we are talking about the mars rover team dealing with that schedule while on earth. If everyone on mars has an extra 40 minutes I would think it would be easier to adapt when facilities, services, and the sun are all on the same clock.

      • This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off). Contrast this to driving across the ocean in a ship and traversing the various time zone. The would adjust things on the ship so as to try to minimize the effect. However, it still sucked.

        BTW, the moon is also tidally locked with the Earth with it's rotation period and orbital period matching almost exactly 1:1. That's why the moon never seems to rotate from our perspective.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off).

          That is a forced schedule. There have been a couple of experiments with groups of people isolated in a mountain to see how people adjust when no sunlight and contact with outer world tells them when to sleep. In those experiments the group adjusted to a 20 hour awake, 10 hour sleep schedule.
          Clearly neither the submarine crew or the 30 hour day people had a problem. What the operators in the article experienced was trying to use a sleeping pattern that didn't correlate with the world around them.
          That means t

          • by CycleMan ( 638982 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @06:34PM (#49150909)
            Interesting. I had read that they adjusted to a 25 hour day, not 30. My source: Richard M. Coleman's book, Wide Awake at 3:00 A.M., page 8, "The results of these sleep-wake cycles shows that most subjects averaged a 25-hour day - that is, left on their own, free from time cues, humans have an internal day length of 25 hours." The problem isn't the Martian day, which is much closer to our natural biorhythms; it is trying to work a Martian time schedule while living on Earth with its time cues.
            • That's what I remember as well - and I seem to remember another study suggesting that humans had a much more difficult time adapting to day lengths outside the range of about 22-26 hours (+/- 2 hours), or was it +/- 1 hour? I forget.

            • When I workedI always felt I needed an other hour of sleep. I'm retired and sleep a minimum of 9 or 10 hours a night. Go to bed at 12:00 and get up at 9:30 or ten. I hate the summertime, it gets bright way too early.
            • by rdnetto ( 955205 )

              I'm not sure if it's the same study, but the 25-hour rhythm is addressed in the article:

              But Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard and chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, discovered that the 1970s finding of a 25-hour natural circadian rhythm for humans was wrong. The original study allowed test subjects to turn on artificial light whenever they wished, unintentionally resetting their bodies’ circadian rhythms.

              At about the time Pathfinder landed, Czeisler and his team began conducting studies at the hospital’s special laboratory that shielded study subjects from all outside influences. With their test subjects in isolation, they simulated the Martian sol to see how the test subjects adjusted to the longer day. “What we learned was none of the people adapted their circadian rhythms to the Martian day,” Czeisler said.

        • This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off). Contrast this to driving across the ocean in a ship and traversing the various time zone.

          Also, experiments done decades ago, in caves with no day-night cycle, led to longer awake cycles much like those. So I really don't see what the problem is here.

          Naturally, it takes time to adjust. Shift-work studies have shown that it takes the body AT LEAST 30 days to fully adjust to a new schedule, some people as long as 60. Interrupt it before then and you end up with problems.

        • "18 hour day (6 on 12 off)"

          You lying sack of shit! Unless your boat is currently running on ultra-quiet you are lucky as hell if you get 5 of that 12 off!
          You are failing to account for:
          * Drills, which can last up to 12 hours a day(and fuck you if that happens to cover the entire time you have to sleep for an entire week)
          * Division training which somehow always falls during your allotted 6 hour sleep time
          * Maintenance, which is what usually occupies the first 6 of that 12 hours
          * More god damn dri
    • They just need to keep their schedule 24 hours earth time, heck they can get even fancier and get it tuned right to the humans perfect body clock. Being that living on mars is so artificial anyways, you might as well don't bother trying to match its nature.

    • Just seal those off and who cares about the outside climate/seasons?

      Many people will have to - because the interesting stuff (I.E. most of the scientific work) will be outdoors.

  • You get used to it. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:13PM (#49148833) Journal

    Seriously - people aren't as fragile as TFA surmises. In the spelunking world, cavers have discovered that after a few weeks without a day/night reference, their circadian cycles stretched out to a 24/24 cycle [boingboing.net]. In the case of a newly-minted Martian, it won't go that extreme, which means that at least within the timeframe of an exploratory journey, it would be no big deal, and they can adjust between the two on the way there and back (there's plenty of time on the journey to do that.)

    Long term is a bit more difficult to predict, but only in how it affects the body overall. It would certainly adjust and stay adjusted, but I can guess (with no evidence either way) that the effect would be no different than Daylight Savings Time cycles would have on the typical adult here on Earth.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      it's only a problem HERE, because eventually your longer day will no longer match the actual day HERE (sunlight, schedule of other people, schedule of other things, etc). on mars, i doubt it would be an issue after a month or less to adjust.

    • by Trax3001BBS ( 2368736 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:22PM (#49148913) Homepage Journal

      I can't post (new design) only reply so picked on you :) .

      Ever been to Alaska?

      Walk out of a bar at 4am and it's as bright as noon is very freaky, and your ready to start the day over.

      Noon during the Winter is dark as midnight. Cabin fever is very real in Alaska when one lives far from anyone else (very common), the reason pot was legalized, it gave an alternative to drinking, as alcohol was being abused for relief.

      40 extra minutes of daylight? pffft

      • by Anonymous Coward

        40 extra minutes of daylight? pffft

        Well, 20 extra minutes of daylight, and 20 extra minutes of night. Double-pffffft

      • I don't get the problem at all; we've had a lunar circadian rhytm for tens of millenia, reset every morning by the sunrise. Adjusting from an internal 25-hour day to an external 24h35m one should, if anything, be easier than adjusting to an external 24h day.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:26PM (#49148955)

      I agree about people not being as fragile.
      When you deploy on a submarine you go months at a time on an 18 hour day set to GMT. To make it worse there is no light or sun to reference day or night and certainly no reference of weekday or weekend. The only reference you have of what time it is was the type of food being served. Breakfast was always at 6 AM and was traditional breakfast food, lunch at noon was lunch food and so on. The funny thing is with the 18 hour personnel schedule, one day breakfast was your first meal, the next day it was your "lunch" and the third day it was your "dinner".

      • When you deploy on a submarine you go months at a time on an 18 hour day set to GMT.

        No you don't. Your watch rotates on an 18 hour cycle, but the boats 'day' (and overall schedule) remains on the standard 24 hour cycle. On top of that, you make the swap from Lima (local time) to Zulu (GMT) once when you leave port and again when you enter port (days, weeks, or months apart) - but someone on Mars time has to deal with the adjustment every day.

        (USS Henry L Stimson, SSBN-655 '83-'87.)

        • by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @04:05PM (#49149773)

          No you don't. Your watch rotates on an 18 hour cycle, but the boats 'day' (and overall schedule) remains on the standard 24 hour cycle. On top of that, you make the swap from Lima (local time) to Zulu (GMT) once when you leave port and again when you enter port (days, weeks, or months apart)

          Irrelevant. You roll out of your rack, go to your watchstation for six hours. Then you do PMS/training/whatever for six hours. Then you sleep for six hours. Repeat till you get back in port.

          In other words, you live on an 18-hour day for the period of your patrol.

          As I recall, it took two to five days to adjust at each end of the patrol.

      • Difference being, when deployed on a submarine, by nature of the mission you are cut off from the outside world.

        When you are deployed on Mars, by nature of the mission, you are a celebrity doing PR appearances multiple times a day. I think this is just preparation for throwing in CNN's face: "No, you get the interview when we give it to you, if it doesn't come live at your optimal time slot, suck it up and play it delayed - we're not going to compromise our people's Martian rhythm for your advertisers."

    • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      In college during one spring break I unintentionally went on a 27-hour cycle and rotated through an entire week, 3 hours per day. And that's with actual sunlight still in the sky to theoretically keep me in line. I was pretty happy being up 17 hours and sleeping 10 (or 18/9) without much trouble, other than not always having a way to get something to eat when I was hungry.

      An extra 40 minutes sounds relatively minor, especially if the whole world is on the same schedule. I'd say wake 20/sleep 20, or, if it's

  • Wrong conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:14PM (#49148837)

    Living on Mars time is difficult when you're living on Earth and are subject to Earth's day/night cycle.

    Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day" to much more than a Mars sol (up to 36 hours IIRC), indicating that adjusting to Mars time is feasible when you're actually on Mars.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:33PM (#49149017) Homepage

      Living in Norway + artificial light + student life with no real commitments I found that my natural cycle is more like 24/12 = 36 hour days than 24. In fact, without alarm clocks I'd have a helluva time staying on the same page as everyone else. The problem is that that sooner or later that clashes with real life and you must get up in the "middle of the night" for a family dinner or you get up in the "morning" and start drinking at a party which messes you up. On Mars making it another 40 mins would be the least of my worries.

      • I don't know why this is modded funny.....my natural rhythm seems to be 20/10, and this seems to be pretty common in my field.
      • Yeah, when I was a student my natural rhythm would slowly creep out to a 25 hour day. Especially in the winter when there wasn't as much pesky sun reminding me of what time it was. It would be fine for a while until eventually I rotated around such that my sleep schedule intersected with my class schedule and I'd have to spend a few days as a zombie resetting my sleep schedule again.
    • Eh, it's a factor but an obvious one that they very likely adjusted for.

      For me, I've always felt like my rhythm was actually longer than 24 hours so for me this sounds like a fabulous thing.

      Therefore, I should get to go first :)
      • Damn you for making me read the entire FA ;-/

        They did do a study that contradicts earlier experiments:

        A person's natural circadian rhythm averages about 24 hours and six minutes for women, and 24 hours and 12 minutes for men. It varies for each individual, but doesn't stray very far from 24 hours. At about the time Pathfinder landed, Czeisler and his team began conducting studies at the hospital's special laboratory that shielded study subjects from all outside influences. With their test subjects in isolation, they simulated the Martian sol to see how the test subjects adjusted to the longer day. "What we learned was none of the people adapted their circadian rhythms to the Martian day," Czeisler said.

        So either earlier studies were off, or Czeisler's experiment was wrong (having e.g. the HVAC on a 24-h cycle, or background noise etc.).

        • by epine ( 68316 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:17PM (#49152069)

          I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.

          I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.

          Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.

          At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.

          The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.

          A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.

          For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.

          From French invasion of Russia [wikipedia.org]:

          The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire! ... One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. ... Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibl

    • Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day".

      Came here to say that. I remember one study/book that concluded people "naturally" have a 25-hour clock. Study participants lived in a (working) hospital with randomized staff schedules and all the clocks taken down, so it may not have been as pure as some other experiments on the matter. The participants had to wake up and go to sleep as a group so their schedules stayed in sync.

    • Living on Mars time is difficult when you're living on Earth and are subject to Earth's day/night cycle.

      Exactly this. 24h40m days are exhausting when you're embedded in a 24h day/night cycle and have to mesh with others on that cycle. It's tough being out of phase with your surroundings. On Mars everyone else is on the same cycle you are, and the only contact you have with the 24h civilization has a significant time delay which makes real-time conversation impossible. Give it a few sols and you'll be righ

  • MiB (Score:5, Funny)

    by XanC ( 644172 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:15PM (#49148849)

    The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You'll get used to it... or you'll have a psychotic episode.

  • Extra sleep (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    40 minutes of extra sleep is hard to adjust to? If we can adjust to seasonal variations in sunlight I think we can adjust to 40 minutes. Admit it, you're doing it wrong.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      As if our corporate overlords would allow that extra time to be ours. They'd demand that the work day be increased to 9 hours, arguing that the extra 80 minutes on weekends should balance that out.
  • How is an extra 40 minutes two timezones? It should be less than one.
  • Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dpidcoe ( 2606549 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:18PM (#49148871)
    These people were trying to adjust to a martian day while still living on earth and seeing the sun still operate on a 24 hour day, so of course they're going to have problems. I'd like to see this tried while keeping the people underground with the lights cycling to actually simulate a martian day.
  • Sign Me Up (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Warhaven ( 718215 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:20PM (#49148885)
    40 extra minutes of sleep each morning? Yes, please!
    • I actually did this (though 2 hours not 40 mins) when studying for an exam. I had gotten myself into a really bad rhythm getting up around noon or so on a regular basis (this was during a period of only exams and no classes), and decided I should reset my biological clock before the exam. However I knew trying to get up early would fail, because I just loved sleeping in too much - even with a 3-alarm-clock system.

      The exam was in 10 days, so I decided to just prolong my day to around 26 hours, which would la

  • He had no problem on Mars... except for the kaboom!

    "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"
  • the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn't coincide with the human body's natural rhythms

    I never really had these "natural rhythms". Or at least I'm not as sensitive to it as most people are. I get tired if I'm up for more than 48 hours or so, but I really never had an issue working different shifts when I was younger, and don't have an issue with changing time zones now. The last time I traveled to the EU with some coworkers, they were acclimated to the time difference after a week. They all complained about waking up in the middle of the night. I arrived in the afternoon and went to bed aroun

  • it obstructs my view of Venus.
  • when you're trying to pretend you're in both places at the same time.

    Your trying to say its hard to adjust to the Martian day ... while still living on Earth and being adjusted to the Earth day.

    Thats fucking retarded to say the least. 40 minutes isn't that big of an issue any more than changing a SINGLE timezone is ... when you aren't still trying to stay on the old schedule as well.

    Rover drivers have the problem of living on Earth, working on Mars ... THATs the problem, not the actual extra 40 minutes.

  • Guess I should volunteer for a mission to Mars. My circadian rhythms seem to run close to 25 hours. I usually have trouble falling asleep before an hour after I fell asleep the previous night.

    Yes, this a bit of a pain when having a job that doesn't allow me to start work an hour later each day.

  • 40min extra sleep every day. I wish I had that on earth. Sign me up for a one way.

  • Obviously anyone used to an Earth day will have problems coping. If we ever colonize Mars, the first generation immigrants will have it rough, but their children will find it perfectly natural.

  • I'm going to have to re-release my biorhythms app just because of their stupid 40 minute extra long days.

    Why can't they just slow Mars' rotation down to to 24 hours????

    • We just need to get some Ruby developers involved to redefine the duration of a second.
    • by I4ko ( 695382 )
      you mean "speed up" mars rotation
      • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

        you mean "speed up" mars rotation

        Speed up, slow down. Whatever. If I'm writing biorhythm programs for a mobile device, do you really think I car along as I get the ad revenue :D

  • by puzzled_decoy ( 3900563 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:32PM (#49149007)

    It's not the length of a day that will impact Mars-dwellers the most, it will be their internet speed.

    • Yeah, that's out the FCCs jurisdiction to protect them from throttling.
    • > It's not the length of a day that will impact Mars-dwellers the most, it will be their internet speed.

      No, it'll be their latency. I believe the scenario informally tossed around by IETF for "extraterrestrial internet" envisions three categories of latency... a relatively small amount of net bandwidth sent directly between Mars and Earth that enjoys the lowest possible latency, and two roughly equal amounts of bulk bandwidth with much longer latencies. handled by satellites at the L3, L4, and L5 Earth-

      • The solution might be to have some sort of store-and-forward protocol for messages and other data. For obvious reasons it might make sense to divide up messages into two distinct types: private ones accessible only to the intended recipient and public messages.

        Since the public messages are just that: messages some sort of viewer "app" would be required to arrange them. Currently this is done by a webapp, but latency to the server would almost certainly makethings better with a native app.

        Since latency is so

        • The problem with relying on that approach is that it completely breaks the ability of Martians to use the same internet as Earthlings. There's no getting around the latency problem, but the availability of nearly infinite (over the span of a single 24-hour window of time, from the perspective of any individual user) bandwidth can go a LONG way towards smoothing over the difference by allowing a degree of adhoc websurfing where the user triggers a load operation, then the proxy proceeds to recursively fetch

  • by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:33PM (#49149011)

    I would of thought that adjusting to the very thin atmosphere with virtually no oxygen would be the biggest problem for humans, then the cold temperatures, and maybe the 1/3 G

    The long days, not so much. But then I work night shift.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Note: off-topic, pedantic, and whiny.

      It's "would have", not "would of". They sound similar, but there's a world of difference, mostly that "would of" is just all kinds of wrong.

      Please stop - it makes you sound uneducated at best, and trending towards an ignoramus.

    • and maybe the 1/3 G

      Well, frankly 3G is bad enough and 2G is more than painful. 1/3G? what's that, like 300bps of mobile internet? I could never cope.

      Interestingly we know that 0G is bad for humans. 1G seems fine. No one has the faintest clue what 1/3G would do long term I suppose because there is literally no practial way of subjecting people to reduced gravity for more than a few seconds.

  • And it does not hurt them (us, I did it for a few years myself) at all. By current law you can only operate for 14 hours a day, then take 10 hours off. This means your day is constantly shifting about an hour longer every day. 14 hours working and driving, then an hour or two working on paperwork and inspecting your truck. Then the mandatory 10 hours rest. A 25 or 26 hour day cycle is perfectly normal and you adjust easily.

    • by aix tom ( 902140 )

      Exactly this. I also did a lot of "crazy shifts" in construction and engineering. Shifting to 25, 26 or even 30 hour cycles for a few months was perfectly doable. In fact, most of the time it turned into a "just sleep a little longer each morning" bliss.

      On the other hand the thing that REALLY almost broke me was a crazy situation where for two month we had to supervise a construction project for 24 hours a day, with only two people available, and the customer being very strict about the 11-hours-on-site max

  • DST (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stafil ( 1220982 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:37PM (#49149047)

    Let's fix it on Earth fist, and stop fucking with our circadian cycles twice a year!

    • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Let's fix it on Earth fist, and stop fucking with our circadian cycles twice a year!

      I take it you never leave the safety of the single time-zone in your mom's basement?

  • by NEDHead ( 1651195 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:39PM (#49149055)

    When the planet is bombarded with comets as part of the terra forming effort, a judicious selection of impact angles will easily speed the rotation to a nominal 24 hour rate

  • So ignore it (Score:2, Interesting)

    Just like on Star Trek. When you're in deep space you just set a 24 hour clock and go with it. Why do you have to observe the Martian day at all?
  • Rocket Lag
    Burnin' out his fuse up here alone
  • To me it sounds like everybody can just get an extra 40 minutes of sleep each day. What is wrong with that!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    to adjust to? No oxygen, -30C temperature, darkness, and no magnetosphere.

    oops.

    But no worries; Elon Musk will fix all!

    • by hawguy ( 1600213 )

      to adjust to? No oxygen, -30C temperature, darkness, and no magnetosphere.

      oops.

      But no worries; Elon Musk will fix all!

      Those are all mitigated by living in shelters. If they live underground, then they don't need to follow the Mars Day, they can still keep to Earth time.

      • It's only slightly better than living in a giant spinning space station... or in a bomb shelter right here.

        Anything you can do on mars, robots can do better. already.

        • by hawguy ( 1600213 )

          It's only slightly better than living in a giant spinning space station... or in a bomb shelter right here.

          Be that as it may, humans can tolerate such conditions and there are plenty of volunteers -- look how many people survive for decades in prison, even harsh prisons outside of the USA where they may literally never leave their cell.

          Anything you can do on mars, robots can do better. already.

          Then why did it take a big team of human workers to build my house? Surely a robot can hammer a nail into a piece of wood?

          Why do we send human firefighters into a burning building? Why are we risking human lives for this if robots can do it better?

          Why does an industrial plant call

        • Anything you can do on mars, robots can do better. already.

          Anything? Says you, your wife, or the battery-powered robot in her bed-side table?

  • I would just use the "extra" time to sleep. They would have a bit of time getting to mars, seems enough time to adjust while in transit.
  • We've spent millions of years evolving in an environment with roughly the same daily periodicity (+- a few seconds.)

    Is it really shocking that we can't easily just readjust our internal clock?
  • by uCallHimDrJ0NES ( 2546640 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @05:23PM (#49150403)

    But I found my hometown waiting for me on Mars, so I just slept it off in my old room from when I was a kid.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I don't get it—why not just sleep in late every day? I know that given my druthers I'd spend 40 extra minutes in bed (or four hours). Doesn't seem like it'd actually be a real problem.

  • Yet some people actually choose to have 28 hour long days, i.e. 6 day long weeks: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik... [explainxkcd.com]
  • Stick down a track, get on a train, move at an average of 15.2mph towards sunset and sunrise (if at the equator), day shortened!!

  • Back in the 80's, IIRC, there was a study where people were put into a cave with nothing but artificial light and allowed to sleep on their own schedule. They ended up with about a 25 hour day.

  • I was the MER Spirit Mission Manager, and I was on Mars time for three months in 2004. I adapted to it and liked it. I got to sleep in an extra 40 minutes a day. I had blackout curtains in my bedroom, so that I could sleep in the dark. However I was one of only a few who voted to stay on Mars time after the end of the primary mission. Most of the people on the operations team didn't like Mars time.
  • You need to have an engineered timepieces that work more slowly. Your hour will be minutes longer, and your Mars pulse somewhat lower. That suggests you should live longer on Mars than if you remained on earth. (grin)

  • If you put a person in a cave for a year without any clocks, they fall into a 30 hour 'day' - up for 20, asleep for 10.
  • Find people who are constantly late...

    It's already been noted by numerous studies, that those who wake up early and are always early, tend to have a circadium pattern which follows a shorter minute/date. Those who are late, have a rhythm that results in a longer perceived minute. The end result, those of us who are the latter will probably finally wake up and function the way we should...

    TAKE ME! TAKE ME!

You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi.

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