Quote:
Originally Posted by KSig RC
Actually, the human body has become accustomed, through centuries of acclimation, to a 24-hour clock. While there are also other related issues (such as the effects of sunlight on production of serotonin, for example), there's literally no good reason to keep time in "Mars time" for a basic exploration. It's likely more useful to keep a 24-hour schedule to prevent a sort of hyper-jet lag (especially considering how much the body would wither with 9 months of zero gravity) - a watch would be very useful, much more so than calibrating time to an astronomical idea of a "Mars day."
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I was thinking the same thing, the only thing a "Mars day" would tell you is when it was daylight or darkness. You can just look around to figure that one out. Staying on 24 hour time seems much more useful to me.
And I don't disagree that it's possible to at some point go, but we can't do it now. Even if you could theoretically get to Mars, a capsule can't carry enough food for a trip of over a year (5 months there, 5 months back, however many months there to wait for the planets to get aligned correctly for the return trip. Let alone anything else you would need. Nasa's goal is to have the new capsule-based orbiter (looks like a bigger Apollo capsule) ready by 2012 or 2013, able to return to the Moon by 2020, and think the capsule would be suitable for Mars travel at some undefined point in the future after that if we can figure out other details. It isn't something we can do now though. Sure we have the technology to blast some shit to Mars, clearly, we've been doing it for a good while. We don't have the technology to keep people alive on that trip though.
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