Adjusting To a Martian Day More Difficult Than Expected

schwit1 writes: Research and actual experience have found that adjusting to the slightly longer Martian day is not as easy as you would think. "If you're on Mars, or at least work by a Mars clock, you have to figure out how to put up with the exhausting challenge of those extra 40 minutes. To be exact, the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn't coincide with the human body's natural rhythms. Scientists, Mars rover drivers, and everyone else in the space community call the Martian day a "sol" to differentiate it from an Earth day. While it doesn't seem like a big difference, that extra time adds up pretty quickly. It's like heading west by two time zones every three days. Call it 'rocket lag.'"

Comments

So live underground

[Anonymous Coward]

...and keep all the lighting on a 24 hour cycle. All the drawings I see of colonies on the moon or Mars all have buildings on the surface. Don't they both have cave systems? Just seal those off and who cares about the outside climate/seasons?

Re:So live underground

[Anonymous Coward]

What every basement-dweller already knows.

Re:So live underground

[Penguinisto]

A good idea, especially since the Moon has a two-week rotation. (by the way, many early drawings of lunar colonies did have underground living featured prominently. There was even a (IMHO dumb) idea to use nuclear weapons to carve out the caves with.

That all said, I think your body (or at least mind) would be in for a shock if you stepped outside on midnight colony time to see the sun high in the sky. But then, folks who live within the Arctic Circle have to put up with seasonal day/night cycle shifts that have some weeks in total darkness during winter (and the opposite in summer). They seem to adapt well enough (though to be fair, they still can rely on a 24-hour rotational cycle no matter where the sun is at any given moment.)

Re:So live underground

[pr0fessor]

I think the biggest problem would be those on the mars days are here on earth and all the life around them is moving on the regular earth cycle... I can't have lunch at my favorite restaurant, go to the bank, etc... because my days are out of sync. Those people in the Arctic Circle are all on the same clock as businesses and everyone else around them.

Re:So live underground

[Ronin Developer]

This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off). Contrast this to driving across the ocean in a ship and traversing the various time zone. The would adjust things on the ship so as to try to minimize the effect. However, it still sucked.

BTW, the moon is also tidally locked with the Earth with it's rotation period and orbital period matching almost exactly 1:1. That's why the moon never seems to rotate from our perspective.

Re:So live underground

[jellomizer]

They just need to keep their schedule 24 hours earth time, heck they can get even fancier and get it tuned right to the humans perfect body clock. Being that living on mars is so artificial anyways, you might as well don't bother trying to match its nature.

Re:So live underground

[DerekLyons]

Just seal those off and who cares about the outside climate/seasons?

Many people will have to - because the interesting stuff (I.E. most of the scientific work) will be outdoors.

Re:So live underground

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off).

That is a forced schedule. There have been a couple of experiments with groups of people isolated in a mountain to see how people adjust when no sunlight and contact with outer world tells them when to sleep. In those experiments the group adjusted to a 20 hour awake, 10 hour sleep schedule.
Clearly neither the submarine crew or the 30 hour day people had a problem. What the operators in the article experienced was trying to use a sleeping pattern that didn't correlate with the world around them.
That means that they probably had problems with sleeping due to light and noise levels they weren't used to. That this causes issues isn't exactly surprising since that has known health impacts and is sometimes used in brainwashing/torture.

Re:So live underground

[shadowrat]

I think the biggest problem would be those on the mars days are here on earth and all the life around them is moving on the regular earth cycle... I can't have lunch at my favorite restaurant, go to the bank, etc... because my days are out of sync. Those people in the Arctic Circle are all on the same clock as businesses and everyone else around them.

i don't think it's going to be the martian day cycle that keeps the first people on Mars from getting to the bank or their favorite restaurant for lunch.

Re:So live underground

[Jane Q. Public]

This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off). Contrast this to driving across the ocean in a ship and traversing the various time zone.

Also, experiments done decades ago, in caves with no day-night cycle, led to longer awake cycles much like those. So I really don't see what the problem is here.

Naturally, it takes time to adjust. Shift-work studies have shown that it takes the body AT LEAST 30 days to fully adjust to a new schedule, some people as long as 60. Interrupt it before then and you end up with problems.

Re:So live underground

[pr0fessor]

Right but we are talking about the mars rover team dealing with that schedule while on earth. If everyone on mars has an extra 40 minutes I would think it would be easier to adapt when facilities, services, and the sun are all on the same clock.

Re:So live underground

[CycleMan]

Interesting. I had read that they adjusted to a 25 hour day, not 30. My source: Richard M. Coleman's book, Wide Awake at 3:00 A.M., page 8, "The results of these sleep-wake cycles shows that most subjects averaged a 25-hour day - that is, left on their own, free from time cues, humans have an internal day length of 25 hours." The problem isn't the Martian day, which is much closer to our natural biorhythms; it is trying to work a Martian time schedule while living on Earth with its time cues.

Re:So live underground

[Immerman]

That's what I remember as well - and I seem to remember another study suggesting that humans had a much more difficult time adapting to day lengths outside the range of about 22-26 hours (+/- 2 hours), or was it +/- 1 hour? I forget.

Re:So live underground

[Slick_W1lly]

Well bugger....

Since you only have 68 days to live after you get there ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci... ) it's sure going to suck, dying just as you're getting used to the new daylight...

Re:So live underground

[Immerman]

They're probably misrembering slightly - the moon has a two-week day, followed by a two-week night, for a full diurnal cycle almost exactly the same as it's orbital period around the Earth (it's tidally locked after all). The discrepancy is of course due to the fact that the Earth completes about 1/12th of an orbit around the sun per one rotation of the moon, so the length of a lunar sol is slightly different than the rotational period - just like with the Earth itself, but more dramatic since a lunar month/day is a lot longer.

Re:So live underground

[volmtech]

When I workedI always felt I needed an other hour of sleep. I'm retired and sleep a minimum of 9 or 10 hours a night. Go to bed at 12:00 and get up at 9:30 or ten. I hate the summertime, it gets bright way too early.

Re:So live underground

[buchner.johannes]

What every basement-dweller already knows.

Why not make a base on Daimos or Phobos? They should be easy to dwell into, and you could start rotate them for extra gravity.

Re:So live underground

[Yomers]

Interestingly, the above link to dailymail redirects me to this http://203.113.26.210/ - I had to use ssh tunnel to get there. I, for one, welcome my local government censor overlords!

Re:So live underground

[beastofburdon]

"18 hour day (6 on 12 off)"

You lying sack of shit! Unless your boat is currently running on ultra-quiet you are lucky as hell if you get 5 of that 12 off!
You are failing to account for:
* Drills, which can last up to 12 hours a day(and fuck you if that happens to cover the entire time you have to sleep for an entire week)
* Division training which somehow always falls during your allotted 6 hour sleep time
* Maintenance, which is what usually occupies the first 6 of that 12 hours
* More god damn drills
* Department training
* All hands training
* Field Day(translation to normal english: extended period of cleaning lasting at least two hours) If you are lucky this only happens once per week
* Broken equipment. Oh, I'm sorry you have only gotten 6 hours of sleep in the past 3 days, but something blew on the motor generator and all of electrical division must help to fix it.

/end rant

But seriously, I have gone to sea on Monday and returned on Friday with less than 5 hours of sleep on multiple occasions. Then there was that two month period in the shipyard which I would rather not go into detail about, besides nobody would believe it.

Re:So live underground

[rdnetto]

I'm not sure if it's the same study, but the 25-hour rhythm is addressed in the article:

But Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard and chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, discovered that the 1970s finding of a 25-hour natural circadian rhythm for humans was wrong. The original study allowed test subjects to turn on artificial light whenever they wished, unintentionally resetting their bodies’ circadian rhythms.

At about the time Pathfinder landed, Czeisler and his team began conducting studies at the hospital’s special laboratory that shielded study subjects from all outside influences. With their test subjects in isolation, they simulated the Martian sol to see how the test subjects adjusted to the longer day. “What we learned was none of the people adapted their circadian rhythms to the Martian day,” Czeisler said.

You get used to it.

[Penguinisto]

Seriously - people aren't as fragile as TFA surmises. In the spelunking world, cavers have discovered that after a few weeks without a day/night reference, their circadian cycles stretched out to a 24/24 cycle. In the case of a newly-minted Martian, it won't go that extreme, which means that at least within the timeframe of an exploratory journey, it would be no big deal, and they can adjust between the two on the way there and back (there's plenty of time on the journey to do that.)

Long term is a bit more difficult to predict, but only in how it affects the body overall. It would certainly adjust and stay adjusted, but I can guess (with no evidence either way) that the effect would be no different than Daylight Savings Time cycles would have on the typical adult here on Earth.

Re:You get used to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's only a problem HERE, because eventually your longer day will no longer match the actual day HERE (sunlight, schedule of other people, schedule of other things, etc). on mars, i doubt it would be an issue after a month or less to adjust.

Re:You get used to it.

[Trax3001BBS]

I can't post (new design) only reply so picked on you :) .

Ever been to Alaska?

Walk out of a bar at 4am and it's as bright as noon is very freaky, and your ready to start the day over.

Noon during the Winter is dark as midnight. Cabin fever is very real in Alaska when one lives far from anyone else (very common), the reason pot was legalized, it gave an alternative to drinking, as alcohol was being abused for relief.

40 extra minutes of daylight? pffft

Re:You get used to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree about people not being as fragile.
When you deploy on a submarine you go months at a time on an 18 hour day set to GMT. To make it worse there is no light or sun to reference day or night and certainly no reference of weekday or weekend. The only reference you have of what time it is was the type of food being served. Breakfast was always at 6 AM and was traditional breakfast food, lunch at noon was lunch food and so on. The funny thing is with the 18 hour personnel schedule, one day breakfast was your first meal, the next day it was your "lunch" and the third day it was your "dinner".

Re:You get used to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

40 extra minutes of daylight? pffft

Well, 20 extra minutes of daylight, and 20 extra minutes of night. Double-pffffft

Re:You get used to it.

[DerekLyons]

When you deploy on a submarine you go months at a time on an 18 hour day set to GMT.

No you don't. Your watch rotates on an 18 hour cycle, but the boats 'day' (and overall schedule) remains on the standard 24 hour cycle. On top of that, you make the swap from Lima (local time) to Zulu (GMT) once when you leave port and again when you enter port (days, weeks, or months apart) - but someone on Mars time has to deal with the adjustment every day.

(USS Henry L Stimson, SSBN-655 '83-'87.)

Re:You get used to it.

[ZorglubZ]

I don't get the problem at all; we've had a lunar circadian rhytm for tens of millenia, reset every morning by the sunrise. Adjusting from an internal 25-hour day to an external 24h35m one should, if anything, be easier than adjusting to an external 24h day.

Re:You get used to it.

[CrimsonAvenger]

No you don't. Your watch rotates on an 18 hour cycle, but the boats 'day' (and overall schedule) remains on the standard 24 hour cycle. On top of that, you make the swap from Lima (local time) to Zulu (GMT) once when you leave port and again when you enter port (days, weeks, or months apart)

Irrelevant. You roll out of your rack, go to your watchstation for six hours. Then you do PMS/training/whatever for six hours. Then you sleep for six hours. Repeat till you get back in port.

In other words, you live on an 18-hour day for the period of your patrol.

As I recall, it took two to five days to adjust at each end of the patrol.

Re:You get used to it.

[Quirkz]

In college during one spring break I unintentionally went on a 27-hour cycle and rotated through an entire week, 3 hours per day. And that's with actual sunlight still in the sky to theoretically keep me in line. I was pretty happy being up 17 hours and sleeping 10 (or 18/9) without much trouble, other than not always having a way to get something to eat when I was hungry.

An extra 40 minutes sounds relatively minor, especially if the whole world is on the same schedule. I'd say wake 20/sleep 20, or, if it's really that exhausting, just sleep the extra 40.

Re:You get used to it.

[JoeMerchant]

Difference being, when deployed on a submarine, by nature of the mission you are cut off from the outside world.

When you are deployed on Mars, by nature of the mission, you are a celebrity doing PR appearances multiple times a day. I think this is just preparation for throwing in CNN's face: "No, you get the interview when we give it to you, if it doesn't come live at your optimal time slot, suck it up and play it delayed - we're not going to compromise our people's Martian rhythm for your advertisers."

Wrong conclusion

[hackertourist]

Living on Mars time is difficult when you're living on Earth and are subject to Earth's day/night cycle.

Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day" to much more than a Mars sol (up to 36 hours IIRC), indicating that adjusting to Mars time is feasible when you're actually on Mars.

Re:Wrong conclusion

[Kjella]

Living in Norway + artificial light + student life with no real commitments I found that my natural cycle is more like 24/12 = 36 hour days than 24. In fact, without alarm clocks I'd have a helluva time staying on the same page as everyone else. The problem is that that sooner or later that clashes with real life and you must get up in the "middle of the night" for a family dinner or you get up in the "morning" and start drinking at a party which messes you up. On Mars making it another 40 mins would be the least of my worries.

Re:Wrong conclusion

[pixelpusher220]

Eh, it's a factor but an obvious one that they very likely adjusted for.

For me, I've always felt like my rhythm was actually longer than 24 hours so for me this sounds like a fabulous thing.

Therefore, I should get to go first :)

Re:Wrong conclusion

[hackertourist]

Damn you for making me read the entire FA ;-/

They did do a study that contradicts earlier experiments:

A person's natural circadian rhythm averages about 24 hours and six minutes for women, and 24 hours and 12 minutes for men. It varies for each individual, but doesn't stray very far from 24 hours. At about the time Pathfinder landed, Czeisler and his team began conducting studies at the hospital's special laboratory that shielded study subjects from all outside influences. With their test subjects in isolation, they simulated the Martian sol to see how the test subjects adjusted to the longer day. "What we learned was none of the people adapted their circadian rhythms to the Martian day," Czeisler said.

So either earlier studies were off, or Czeisler's experiment was wrong (having e.g. the HVAC on a 24-h cycle, or background noise etc.).

Re:Wrong conclusion

[elfprince13]

I don't know why this is modded funny.....my natural rhythm seems to be 20/10, and this seems to be pretty common in my field.

Re:Wrong conclusion

[firewrought]

Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day".

Came here to say that. I remember one study/book that concluded people "naturally" have a 25-hour clock. Study participants lived in a (working) hospital with randomized staff schedules and all the clocks taken down, so it may not have been as pure as some other experiments on the matter. The participants had to wake up and go to sleep as a group so their schedules stayed in sync.

Re:Wrong conclusion

[dpidcoe]

Yeah, when I was a student my natural rhythm would slowly creep out to a 25 hour day. Especially in the winter when there wasn't as much pesky sun reminding me of what time it was. It would be fine for a while until eventually I rotated around such that my sleep schedule intersected with my class schedule and I'd have to spend a few days as a zombie resetting my sleep schedule again.

Re:Wrong conclusion

[epine]

I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.

I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.

Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.

At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.

The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.

A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.

For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.

From French invasion of Russia:

The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire! ... One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. ... Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibl

Re:Wrong conclusion

[Chelloveck]

Living on Mars time is difficult when you're living on Earth and are subject to Earth's day/night cycle.

Exactly this. 24h40m days are exhausting when you're embedded in a 24h day/night cycle and have to mesh with others on that cycle. It's tough being out of phase with your surroundings. On Mars everyone else is on the same cycle you are, and the only contact you have with the 24h civilization has a significant time delay which makes real-time conversation impossible. Give it a few sols and you'll be right on track.

40 extra minutes of sleep per day... Not exhausting at all!

MiB

[XanC]

The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You'll get used to it... or you'll have a psychotic episode.

Extra sleep

[Anonymous Coward]

40 minutes of extra sleep is hard to adjust to? If we can adjust to seasonal variations in sunlight I think we can adjust to 40 minutes. Admit it, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Extra sleep

[Anonymous Coward]

As if our corporate overlords would allow that extra time to be ours. They'd demand that the work day be increased to 9 hours, arguing that the extra 80 minutes on weekends should balance that out.

Heading west two timezones per day?

[donour]

How is an extra 40 minutes two timezones? It should be less than one.

Re:Heading west two timezones per day?

[donour]

D'oh. Every three days....

Re:Heading west two timezones per day?

[Anonymous Coward]

40min a day for a week = 360min

Re:Heading west two timezones per day?

[psyque]

Well that's a math fail

Re:Heading west two timezones per day?

[tysonedwards]

On Mars, they too are 7 days.

They instead have 27 months as compared to our 12.

Uh...

[dpidcoe]

These people were trying to adjust to a martian day while still living on earth and seeing the sun still operate on a 24 hour day, so of course they're going to have problems. I'd like to see this tried while keeping the people underground with the lights cycling to actually simulate a martian day.

Re:Uh...

[amiga3D]

I really think I could use an extra 40 minutes of sleep every night. No problem.

Sign Me Up

[Warhaven]

40 extra minutes of sleep each morning? Yes, please!

Re:Sign Me Up

[CptJeanLuc]

I actually did this (though 2 hours not 40 mins) when studying for an exam. I had gotten myself into a really bad rhythm getting up around noon or so on a regular basis (this was during a period of only exams and no classes), and decided I should reset my biological clock before the exam. However I knew trying to get up early would fail, because I just loved sleeping in too much - even with a 3-alarm-clock system.

The exam was in 10 days, so I decided to just prolong my day to around 26 hours, which would land me perfectly on exam time - and this is what I did. It was a great experience, I was well rested each "cycle", and during the night it is easy to study with no distractions or interruptions. I had not told the other students living in the dorm about my project, and I remember the priceless look of surprise on one of them as he was getting out from his room at 7 AM in the morning wiping his eyes and coming into kitchen, and the first thing he saw was me taking a lasagne out of the oven (for dinner).

A Mars day with not even 25 hours? Bring it on ... the only thing better would be if we could find a 26-hour planet.

It worked for Marvin

[MagickalMyst]

He had no problem on Mars... except for the kaboom!

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"

Not a problem

[The Grim Reefer]

the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn't coincide with the human body's natural rhythms

I never really had these "natural rhythms". Or at least I'm not as sensitive to it as most people are. I get tired if I'm up for more than 48 hours or so, but I really never had an issue working different shifts when I was younger, and don't have an issue with changing time zones now. The last time I traveled to the EU with some coworkers, they were acclimated to the time difference after a week. They all complained about waking up in the middle of the night. I arrived in the afternoon and went to bed around 9 in the evening and slept great and was perfectly adjusted the next morning.

Even so, I have zero interest in going to Mars. But I can't imagine that there aren't people like me that would be willing to go.

Oh, I'm going to blow it up

[jfdavis668]

it obstructs my view of Venus.

Ignorant premise, living in2 timezones is hard

[BitZtream]

when you're trying to pretend you're in both places at the same time.

Your trying to say its hard to adjust to the Martian day ... while still living on Earth and being adjusted to the Earth day.

Thats fucking retarded to say the least. 40 minutes isn't that big of an issue any more than changing a SINGLE timezone is ... when you aren't still trying to stay on the old schedule as well.

Rover drivers have the problem of living on Earth, working on Mars ... THATs the problem, not the actual extra 40 minutes.

Good news for me.

[mcmonkey]

Guess I should volunteer for a mission to Mars. My circadian rhythms seem to run close to 25 hours. I usually have trouble falling asleep before an hour after I fell asleep the previous night.

Yes, this a bit of a pain when having a job that doesn't allow me to start work an hour later each day.

Sleep in

[psyque]

40min extra sleep every day. I wish I had that on earth. Sign me up for a one way.

"Adjusting" is the key word

[in10se]

Obviously anyone used to an Earth day will have problems coping. If we ever colonize Mars, the first generation immigrants will have it rough, but their children will find it perfectly natural.

Damn those martian colonists

[OzPeter]

I'm going to have to re-release my biorhythms app just because of their stupid 40 minute extra long days.

Why can't they just slow Mars' rotation down to to 24 hours????

Re:Damn those martian colonists

[tysonedwards]

We just need to get some Ruby developers involved to redefine the duration of a second.

Re:Damn those martian colonists

[I4ko]

you mean "speed up" mars rotation

Re:Damn those martian colonists

[OzPeter]

you mean "speed up" mars rotation

Speed up, slow down. Whatever. If I'm writing biorhythm programs for a mobile device, do you really think I car along as I get the ad revenue :D

Let's stay focused, people

[puzzled_decoy]

It's not the length of a day that will impact Mars-dwellers the most, it will be their internet speed.

Re:Let's stay focused, people

[killkillkill]

Yeah, that's out the FCCs jurisdiction to protect them from throttling.

Re:Let's stay focused, people

[Miamicanes]

> It's not the length of a day that will impact Mars-dwellers the most, it will be their internet speed.

No, it'll be their latency. I believe the scenario informally tossed around by IETF for "extraterrestrial internet" envisions three categories of latency... a relatively small amount of net bandwidth sent directly between Mars and Earth that enjoys the lowest possible latency, and two roughly equal amounts of bulk bandwidth with much longer latencies. handled by satellites at the L3, L4, and L5 Earth-Sun and Mars-Sun Lagrange points. For semi-adhoc websurfing, your request would get sent along the fast (bandwidth-limited) link, and the response would travel along one or both of the lagrange paths. Someone like Akamai would come up with an open web standard that allowed sites to export themselves in their entirety (and remain synchronized in an rsync-like manner) so they'd run in a local VM on Mars.

Let's use StackOverflow as an example. To kick the whole thing off, SO would take a snapshot of itself (kind of like it already does for archive.org) and begin uploading it to the server on Mars along the high-latency longer lagrangian bulk-data path. Once the server on Mars had a complete copy, it would become their local mirror. Normal bulk updates would occur frequently and periodically along the longest lagrangian path. Posted questions by someone on Mars (and the text of replies to them) might get expedited and sent along the shorter direct route.

Porn sites and Youtube would do the same thing. If a Martian wanted to visit some smaller site, he'd have to tag them for fetching and wait a few hours for them to become available. They'd probably follow a "Martians Pay" pricing model that split the bandwidth costs among everyone on Mars who accessed specific sites on a regular basis. Popular sites with lots of users (like Reddit and StackOverflow) would be cheap despite having lots of data because the cost would be divided among lots of Martian users. More offbeat sites might force individual users to be somewhat selective and conservative about their bulk-fetches (or at least about keeping them updated in perpetuity if they're only interested in viewing them as a one-shot activity), and might rebate back part of the initial acquisition cost if/when future users go to view the same site (ie, you, the first user, might pay $5 to bulk-grab all the blogger.com postings of {some-user}, but get $2 of it rebated back when/if some future person pays $3, and you'd both get another buck (and further diminishing rebates) as more people paid diminishing prices to gain access to it.

By the same token, cable networks like HBO and SkyTV would bundle their new video content daily and bulk-upload it to their local affiliate on Mars (who'd make it initially available at some official scheduled time, and thereafter by streaming).

Ironically, the biggest single limiting factor to bandwidth wouldn't be between Earth and Mars, but between the surface of the Earth and a satellite orbiting the earth in geostationary orbit.Between the L3 and L4 satellites, you can use 30GHz of spectrum if you've got the hardware & power budget to do it. Then double it by sending half the data along the path in the other direction. The problem is the "last mile" between orbit and the surface, where it's likely that something more exotic will be required (say, multiple satellites using tightly-focused lasers to ferry the bulk data between earth and orbit, then bulk-uploading their chunks directly to the lagrangian satellites.

In short, the future of interplanetary internet can be summed up as multipath, multilink, and Akamai-like CDNs hosting VMs for earth websites on Mars. The biggest hard challenges aren't the technical ones... it'll be dealing with Hollywood lawyers and the copyright mafia losing sleep at night that their precious content is being cached on Mars with insufficient DRM or that someone, somewhere on Mars, is listening to a song that was improperly licensed.

The resources to maintain this kind of large-scale local cache would be substantial... but probably agreed to without hesitation on the grounds that they'd be likely to make the single biggest difference to morale on Mars than anything not directly related to life-or-death.

Re:Let's stay focused, people

[serviscope_minor]

The solution might be to have some sort of store-and-forward protocol for messages and other data. For obvious reasons it might make sense to divide up messages into two distinct types: private ones accessible only to the intended recipient and public messages.

Since the public messages are just that: messages some sort of viewer "app" would be required to arrange them. Currently this is done by a webapp, but latency to the server would almost certainly makethings better with a native app.

Since latency is so high, it is probably worth splitting public messages (and provate ones, but there's less need) into a sort of heirachal response/reply system as that gives the kind of fine grained control you need when latency is high. Even if they're text, binaries could be attached using some sort of archiveing and conversion protocol, giving multipart messages or something.

IOW we've already developed very good tech to solve this problem in the 70s, when latency was really high: it took I think over 24 hours for an email to traverse the world with UUCP. These things went out of fashion because latency isn't high on Earth any more and there's more felxible things one can do without high latency. No amount of engineering will solve the latency to mars problem, and the old systems are well suited.

This is not a case of "old is better", it's a case of the old things being designed to cope well with a situation which is no longer present on Earth but is and will remain present between the Earth and Mars.

Re:Let's stay focused, people

[Miamicanes]

The problem with relying on that approach is that it completely breaks the ability of Martians to use the same internet as Earthlings. There's no getting around the latency problem, but the availability of nearly infinite (over the span of a single 24-hour window of time, from the perspective of any individual user) bandwidth can go a LONG way towards smoothing over the difference by allowing a degree of adhoc websurfing where the user triggers a load operation, then the proxy proceeds to recursively fetch not only that specific page, but every page and bit of content linked to it for several levels. Kind of like getting deliveries on a remote island where it takes weeks for goods to arrive... but when the ship DOES arrive, it's a Chinese-sized mega-freighter that costs almost the same per trip whether it's full or empty.

More importantly, there's a potentially-lucrative market for such local caching services right here on Earth: cruise ships. When a ship's in port, it can have fiber-speed connectivity. When it's at sea, satellite data bandwidth is limited, but hard drive space is cheap. Instead of sending only videos explicitly requested by passengers on a specific ship TO that ship, you could just bundle up all of Youtube's daily updates requested by anyone on any ship that's a customer, and broadcast them once (plus enough extra data for forward error correction) to every ship watching that particular satellite (so that if a passenger goes to watch a video the next day, it'll already be cached locally).

The same approach would work for providing internet access on Antarctica. Run fiber to an island near the Antarctic Peninsula, then build microwave relay towers to handle inland backhaul. Strictly speaking, latency would be low (since it would be microwave to fiber), but bandwidth during the winter would still be scarce because we're talking about a thousand-mile microwave-relay route from the South Pole to the nearest viable fiber drop... and snow does terrible things to link quality above 2GHz (think: weather radar frequencies. The signals hit snowflakes and ricochet & experience doppler shift) during the time of the year when good internet access is needed by residents the most urgently.

I would of thought

[rossdee]

I would of thought that adjusting to the very thin atmosphere with virtually no oxygen would be the biggest problem for humans, then the cold temperatures, and maybe the 1/3 G

The long days, not so much. But then I work night shift.

Re:I would of thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: off-topic, pedantic, and whiny.

It's "would have", not "would of". They sound similar, but there's a world of difference, mostly that "would of" is just all kinds of wrong.

Please stop - it makes you sound uneducated at best, and trending towards an ignoramus.

Re:I would of thought

[serviscope_minor]

and maybe the 1/3 G

Well, frankly 3G is bad enough and 2G is more than painful. 1/3G? what's that, like 300bps of mobile internet? I could never cope.

Interestingly we know that 0G is bad for humans. 1G seems fine. No one has the faintest clue what 1/3G would do long term I suppose because there is literally no practial way of subjecting people to reduced gravity for more than a few seconds.

Truck drivers live on a constant shifting clock

[nobuddy]

And it does not hurt them (us, I did it for a few years myself) at all. By current law you can only operate for 14 hours a day, then take 10 hours off. This means your day is constantly shifting about an hour longer every day. 14 hours working and driving, then an hour or two working on paperwork and inspecting your truck. Then the mandatory 10 hours rest. A 25 or 26 hour day cycle is perfectly normal and you adjust easily.

Re:Truck drivers live on a constant shifting clock

[aix tom]

Exactly this. I also did a lot of "crazy shifts" in construction and engineering. Shifting to 25, 26 or even 30 hour cycles for a few months was perfectly doable. In fact, most of the time it turned into a "just sleep a little longer each morning" bliss.

On the other hand the thing that REALLY almost broke me was a crazy situation where for two month we had to supervise a construction project for 24 hours a day, with only two people available, and the customer being very strict about the 11-hours-on-site maximum. So it turned into a 11 hours on / 11 hours off job with a 22 hour cycle, where we had to get up two hours EARLIER every day. That's not something I would like to ever do again.

DST

[stafil]

Let's fix it on Earth fist, and stop fucking with our circadian cycles twice a year!

Re:DST

[OzPeter]

Let's fix it on Earth fist, and stop fucking with our circadian cycles twice a year!

I take it you never leave the safety of the single time-zone in your mom's basement?

Re: DST

[OzPeter]

I wouldn't be complaining if that was the case, would I?

There are 4+ time zones in the US alone (*). Bounce around those a couple of times and you'll wonder why you thought DST was such a big deal.

* Depending on whether you count Puerto Rico, Guam or other US locations in addition to the 50 states.

Solution is already in the works

[NEDHead]

When the planet is bombarded with comets as part of the terra forming effort, a judicious selection of impact angles will easily speed the rotation to a nominal 24 hour rate

So ignore it

[Chess_the_cat]

Just like on Star Trek. When you're in deep space you just set a 24 hour clock and go with it. Why do you have to observe the Martian day at all?

...with apologies to Elton John

[MikeOnBike]

Rocket Lag
Burnin' out his fuse up here alone

Extra Sleep!

[Agent0013]

To me it sounds like everybody can just get an extra 40 minutes of sleep each day. What is wrong with that!

You know what else will be difficult

[Anonymous Coward]

to adjust to? No oxygen, -30C temperature, darkness, and no magnetosphere.

oops.

But no worries; Elon Musk will fix all!

Re:You know what else will be difficult

[hawguy]

to adjust to? No oxygen, -30C temperature, darkness, and no magnetosphere.

oops.

But no worries; Elon Musk will fix all!

Those are all mitigated by living in shelters. If they live underground, then they don't need to follow the Mars Day, they can still keep to Earth time.

Pfft

[EdwardFurlong]

I would just use the "extra" time to sleep. They would have a bit of time getting to mars, seems enough time to adjust while in transit.

Re:Then why live on mars?

[hawguy]

It's only slightly better than living in a giant spinning space station... or in a bomb shelter right here.

Be that as it may, humans can tolerate such conditions and there are plenty of volunteers -- look how many people survive for decades in prison, even harsh prisons outside of the USA where they may literally never leave their cell.

Anything you can do on mars, robots can do better. already.

Then why did it take a big team of human workers to build my house? Surely a robot can hammer a nail into a piece of wood?

Why do we send human firefighters into a burning building? Why are we risking human lives for this if robots can do it better?

Why does an industrial plant call in a human technician to repair their broken robots, why don't they just call in a robot to fix the robot?

Special purpose science robots can do a lot, but there is still no robot that's as versatile as a human. The mars rover is a great example of a robot performing great science (that's far exceeded expectations), but try asking it to step over a 2 foot high wall to reach an interesting object, or asking it to excavate a 3 foot deep hole to see if someone buried an obelisk there.

Funny how we can't just override evolution

[Tangential]

We've spent millions of years evolving in an environment with roughly the same daily periodicity (+- a few seconds.)

Is it really shocking that we can't easily just readjust our internal clock?

I had rocket lag all rocket summer.

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

But I found my hometown waiting for me on Mars, so I just slept it off in my old room from when I was a kid.

Re:Then why live on mars?

[fahrbot-bot]

Anything you can do on mars, robots can do better. already.

Anything? Says you, your wife, or the battery-powered robot in her bed-side table?

Why not just sleep in late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it—why not just sleep in late every day? I know that given my druthers I'd spend 40 extra minutes in bed (or four hours). Doesn't seem like it'd actually be a real problem.

40 min? How about 4 hours extra per day?

[trumpetplayer]

Yet some people actually choose to have 28 hour long days, i.e. 6 day long weeks: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Just travel at 15.19mph

[MrL0G1C]

Stick down a track, get on a train, move at an average of 15.2mph towards sunset and sunrise (if at the equator), day shortened!!

Don't bother learning from past studies

[Theovon]

Back in the 80's, IIRC, there was a study where people were put into a cave with nothing but artificial light and allowed to sleep on their own schedule. They ended up with about a 25 hour day.

I liked Mars time

[dradler]

I was the MER Spirit Mission Manager, and I was on Mars time for three months in 2004. I adapted to it and liked it. I got to sleep in an extra 40 minutes a day. I had blackout curtains in my bedroom, so that I could sleep in the dark. However I was one of only a few who voted to stay on Mars time after the end of the primary mission. Most of the people on the operations team didn't like Mars time.

Martian day longer than earths, solution is easy

[lsatenstein]

You need to have an engineered timepieces that work more slowly. Your hour will be minutes longer, and your Mars pulse somewhat lower. That suggests you should live longer on Mars than if you remained on earth. (grin)

Wait... "Natural" rhythms?

[sabbede]

If you put a person in a cave for a year without any clocks, they fall into a 30 hour 'day' - up for 20, asleep for 10.

Easy fix...

[PortHaven]

Find people who are constantly late...

It's already been noted by numerous studies, that those who wake up early and are always early, tend to have a circadium pattern which follows a shorter minute/date. Those who are late, have a rhythm that results in a longer perceived minute. The end result, those of us who are the latter will probably finally wake up and function the way we should...

TAKE ME! TAKE ME!