What does Nick do with the 40 minutes driving to and from church? He thinks about stuff; Odd stuff as is fitting for the Nick to think about...

Tonight on the way back I began thinking of time zones and the international date line. I then began to think about space travel and colonizing other planets.

What sort of problems would we encounter if travel between planets were ever to be made as quick as it is in the worlds of Star Trek and Babylon 5?

There are a number of things I thought of. One, the idea of being in space where the rotation of a planet does not effect your time. What time zone would you be associated with? The obvious answer is GMT since it’s pretty much a standard for lots of things.

HOWEVER, what if we colonized a planet with a completely different rotation? Days could end up being 22 hours or 30 hours, or any amount of hours, this would also cause the planetary time zones to be different.

So I suppose in the future when we have discovered FTL travel (If we don’t have FTL travel you can have the ship adjust the passengers slowly to the new rate of day/night passage) and start colonizing other planets with various rates of day/night rotation we will have to adopt some sort of universal time measurement.

But the problem of traveling between worlds would still be there. We experience jet lag when traveling a few time zones over; what would it do to us to travel from a planet to 24 hour days to one with 20 or 30 hour days?

Ah the questions never end. Perhaps we just only colonize worlds with rotations and sizes similar to our own. I suppose we could colonize a larger world with a faster rotation and a smaller one with a slower rotation, so long as the distance from the star the same relative to the star’s size as our planet’s distance. Of course then you would also have some problems with slower and faster rotation and the temperature of the night side of the planet.

Ach, it never ceases!!!!!
- posted by Nick @ 6/11/2003 11:32:00 PM | 0 comments