Keeping track of time in Disconnect
One of the things I have been wanting to do in Disconnect is play a bit with how time is kept. Without giving away too much of the story, multiple planets separated by several weeks of travel spanning different star systems would in my mind lead to a situation where the time standards that we all know today have maybe evolved.
Time-keeping is a core component of my day job as I base all of my work on the use of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It’s a relatively simple system where you just need to keep track of one time for the whole planet and then use an offset to determine the local time.
Since I live in Vancouver, my time zone is -7 UTC (which recently changed from -8), this means that I am seven hours behind from what UTC displays.
Here’s an example using a very basic JavaScript clock:
| UTC | Vancouver (-7 UTC) |
|---|---|
You’re not limited to offsets that are whole integers either. Examples include Newfoundland time, where the island of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador has an offset of -03:30, or Central Western Standard Time, which gives it an offset of +8:45. It has its quirks, but translating between these times is fairly painless provided your loved ones are not in either of these trying to call each other.
Imagine the frustration of someone in Cocklebiddy in Western Australia trying to figure out when to call their mother who lives in Dildo, Newfoundland and Labrador.
I hold the belief that this system, while geocentric, works well for humanity even if off-world as if you’re in a spaceship travelling around our star system, it is fine. However, what about calendars? And what about other planets?
I hate calendars
The importance of calendars should not be understated: knowing where we are in the year is important for ensuring that our agriculture knows when to grow crops and for legal and financial systems to keep working. However, I am going to show something that may be frustrating to see for the first time.
The months of September, October, November, and December are not where they should be and the year should really start sometime around March. For those of you familiar with the history of Rome as well as the Roman empire, this something you might know already, but January and February did not exist prior to the latter part of 700 BCE. You’d have ten months or 304 days in the calendar, and then winter.
The names of the aforementioned months mean in Latin the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth month–if you don’t speak Latin but speak French, you’ll catch on to how the months are spelt. However, around 713 BCE, January and February were tacked on at the start of the calendar, only because of the importance of end of year celebrations.
While those months were added on to the calendar, it still didn’t mean that the year started on January 1st as it just meant that the calendar rolled over.
Christmas day, which has remained consistent as December 25 for much of Europe, was for a long time the start of the year, whereas some adhered to March 1st due to Roman empire influences, and also March 25th, in honour of conception of Jesus. Adoption of January 1st as the start of the year started with the Germans in 1544 and then finally with the American colonies under British control in 1752, two hundred and eight years later.
American exceptionalism predates their revolution I swear.
I know there are other calendars out there such as the Chinese or Hindu ones rife with similar problems I am sure. However, the internationally-accepted calendar we have today is the Gregorian, which in October 1582, was adopted after it was realised that Europe was using a calendar, the Julian, that was off by over a week due to a miscalculation of leap year handling.
The error made with the Julian calendar was that the year was 325.25 days, lending the thought that exactly every four years, we tack on an extra day. However, the year is actually 365.2425 days, so tacking on that extra day like before may seem okay, but it starts to become a problem as centuries become millenniums. At the start of this section, I made a remark about knowing when to grow crops, well eventually the growing season is not going to align with the equinox and that was a problem if we’re going to find ourselves relying on this calendar.
So when the day of Thursday, October 4th, 1582 came to an end, the next day jumped ahead ten whole days to Friday, October 15th. This is why we now have a complicated rule of a leap year being on every year divisible by four, except where it is divisible by 100 unless it itself is divisible by 400. This is why the year 2000 was a leap year, but the year 2100 will not be.
Are we out of the woods with this calendar? Nope. There is a something called a leap second, which gets added periodically based on all sorts of arbitrary variables that our calendar cannot cope with.. It has been since 2016 that we’ve come to witness some, and that is only because they’ve opted to accept that we can ignore them until the mid-2100s in the hopes we figure out how to get computer programmers to deal with it better or some technology comes around to solve it all together.
Let me close off this section by saying this: our geocentric calendar is going to suck in space but we’re also probably going to be stuck with it because of how we focus on human biology.
We do not have to have 24 hours
Before I proceed: I am going to talk about solar days and solar days only.
If you do the basic equation of 24x60x60, you end up with 86,400, which is the number of seconds the a solar day occupies. The definition of a second originally was based off the rotation of the Earth, but it was then defined based off of the frequency if caesium, which unlike our home, does not deviate from our measurements.
The Earth is actually slowing down. Six hundred million years ago, a solar day would have been 21 hours, but due to influences from the Moon and the Sun or other influences including filling giant hydroelectric dam basins, it is quite apparent that for good measurements, the Earth itself is not reliable. So technically speaking, you could say that a solar day on Earth is 86,400.0025 seconds, hence the leap second I mentioned earlier.
But we don’t need to care about that so 86,400 is good enough.
While “good enough”, there are only so many factors for that number. There are 96 divisors that could fit into that value.
So why not just abolish it? Why don’t we use a thousand minutes to define a day? There’s 1,440 minutes in a day and it would not be that far fetched to consider something different. Let’s talk about Beat Time.
| UTC | Beat time |
|---|---|
My friend, Jessica made me enamoured with the use of .beats, a scheme developed by Swatch in the 1990s. It isn’t metric time, which was adopted by the French Republic post-revolution, but it is a scheme that permits the existing calendar but adopts a scheme that is intended to be used without time zones.
The abolishment of time zones has been proposed by numerous people in the past, including science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. I did say earlier that the use of offsets was a good idea, but I think that .beats is objectively better.
The idea of saying “I will meet you at 800” works real well in my mind.
Time dilation and its lack of importance
Back to our friend Mars, trying to keep clocks in sync will require you to contend with general relativity. This late-2025 paper in The Astronomical Journal brought this to light:
This study estimates clock rates on Mars and compares them to those on the Moon and Earth. We find that, on average, clocks on Mars tick faster than those on the Earth’s geoid by 477 μs day, with a variation of 226 μs day over a Martian year. Additionally, there is an amplitude modulation of approximately 40 μs day over seven synodic cycles.
Our good ol’ friend relativity means that time keeping between multiple planets not only has to consider rotation and orbit, but the velocity and tidal forces too. 226-477 μs does not seem that significant, but given that you’re dealing with about a quarter to almost half of a a millisecond, it is not immeasurable.
However, it is insignificant for the purposes of the book, so I don’t really care. I just wanted to bring this all up because I thought this part was neat.