this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
905 points (94.9% liked)

Programmer Humor

32721 readers
694 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 72 points 5 months ago (6 children)

It's pretty simple, actually. A village somewhere in Europe that is completely in the shade all day for part of the year has already proven it.

Mirrors.

We just need a ring of motorized mirrors around the Earth.

At hour 0, the mirrors will rotate to show sun all across the entire Earth.

At hour 12, the mirrors will rotate to put all of the Earth into night time.

That lets the entire Earth have the exact same synchronized time synchronized with the daylight.

The mirrors will block the sun from parts of the earth facing during the night.

The mirrors will constantly be rotating to keep the proper amount of sun light facing each part of Earth as the Earth rotates.

The mirrors will be solar powered.

This will fix it, right?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago

I don't see any way whatsoever that could mean this project is not viable.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago

Now I'm thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Sounds feasible.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Alternatively, we have this arbitrary standard of 9am means morning, if we share a single universal time, different places would just have a different arbitrary time being the "morning" instead.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Lunchtime, doubly so!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Time is a cube, and always will be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

i would aruge that the arbitrary factor of "9am being morning" is entirely to do with the fact that morning is actually a solar time phenomenon, whereas global time does not have the concept of morning, since it is merely imitating the local solar time.

Local solar time being the literal point in the sky that the sun is in.

It gets even funnier if we include people who aren't "normal" I for one, consider noon to be morning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

We could keep the 0 hour as the "middle" of the night and 12 being the "middle" of the day (though I'm not sure if that's really the sun's high spot for the day for any places).

But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

No, we should ~~educate all devs and fix all broken time API's,...~~

wait, your solution seems far easier.