2854: Date Line
| Date Line |
 Title text: They estimate the rocket should be free by approximately ... uh ... well, in about two hours. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a SNAGGED LINE THAT COULDN'T FINISH THE EDITING JOB - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
The International Date Line is a nominal line on Earth near the antimeridian (180°) that marks where travel across will require your clock to be adjusted by a full day (forwards or backwards), give or take the 'normal' time of day adjustment. It is one of three situations where the date might change for you, the usual one being when (in your time zone) you pass from the hour of 11 pm across beyond midnight, but also may occur if you travel directly between time zones at such a time (usually that being a window of just one specific hour, at night) where they are each either side of midnight.
Most people don't travel at or around midnight, and just being awake as the clocks tick over is not often such a remarkable thing other than to perhaps mark reaching a special date (significant birthdays, perhaps, or New Year's Day), but travel across or between areas of east and west Pacific (or vice-versa) is not so uncommon yet comes with it the special need to effectively adjust your watch by a full day (plus or minus any other time to be adjusted).
The International Date Line is not a physical string,[citation needed] and therefore could not be caught by a rocket. It should also be noted that the International Date Line is not a straight line, but extends either side of the antimeridian to avoid confusion on internal land journeys (like Russia, a portion of which overlaps the antimeridian), similarly cutting off 'nearby' outlying island territories or adding needless complexity when dealing with chosen trading partners. (There may also be the niche tourism-led motivation of being able to claim 'first' in experiencing the new date.)
Based off what is shown in the comic, the rocket could have been launched by the Russians (e.g. from the Vostochny Cosmodrome), but the caption implies that the American space agency is the one expecting to resolve the issue (whoever's original error it was), and all orbital flights are pretty much guaranteed to cross (over) the dateline at some point in the initial track. Of course, the odds of a rocket getting stuck on such a line (if it existed) would be incredibly slim. Additionally, striking such an object wouldn’t trap the rocket. Instead, the rocket would undergo what many KSP users have encountered, a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.
The caption suggests that this event has messed up the normal regulation of time, and is somehow unsafe to 'use' as a result, so people should pause their usage of it by stopping their clocks and calendars. Also, because time is not behaving normally, ‘they’ can’t give a time for when it will be fixed. If, say, it was 8:00 when the rocket got snagged, then it is 8:00 until they fix it. This means that no matter how much time should have passed, until they fix it, it will remain 8:00. in reality, even if a physical dateline did exist, and if disturbing it were to mess up our ability to measure time, synchronize clocks, and so on, time itself would continue to flow regardless, and pausing one's clock would have no effect on this. Indeed, if time stopped operating, it's not entirely clear what an amount of time that 'should have passed' would even mean, or if we would be able to perceive that anything was wrong.
The title text states that the estimated time the rocket should be free is "about two hours,” but the speaker/writer hesitates when about to give a estimated time stamp, as normal time cannot work if the IDL is not working
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- [The earth, with the date line as a physical band being pulled off of the surface by a rocket, cutting into the land on the other side.]
- Caption: Timekeeping announcement: a rocket accidentally became snagged on the international date line during launch. Please pause all clocks and calendars until NASA is able to free it and safely resume the normal flow of time.
Trivia
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{{comic discussion} The about two hours might reference the orbital time of LEO satellites }
