I really like the calendar that Kim Stanley Robinson designed for Mars except for just one problem: it only barely functions as a calendar. It’s the sort of thing that’s great for science but is quite frustrating for normal human use. A good example of this is Kelvin. Using Kelvin for science is great because it’s an absolute scale. It never really needs to be changed or converted based on what you’re doing scientifically. For actual use, however, Kelvin is almost entirely worthless. The average high and low temperatures for March in Austin are 74 and 52 degrees Fahrenheit or 296 and 284 Kelvin respectively. It technically means the same thing. It’s just a far more clunky way of showing it.
Another pretty massive problem with the Martian calendar that they came up with is that not every degree is the same length. Because the Martian orbit is elliptical, and orbits cover equal areas in equal times, whenever the planet is on the side of its orbit where it’s closer to the sun (near perihelion) it moves faster and whenever it’s on the side of the orbit farther from the sun (near aphelion) it’s going to move more slowly. This speed discrepancy makes one degree of an orbit take longer when the planet is further away from the sun. A fact that wouldn’t be quite so frustrating If Kim Stanley Robinson himself hadn’t outlined a far more sensical 24-month calendar directly below the graphic explaining the calendar the colonists were using.
Interestingly the degrees system that the colonists were using on Mars, despite its flaws on Mars would work quite well on Earth. Earth’s orbit is far less eccentric than Mars' and so it doesn’t speed up and slow down quite so much in its orbit. This means that if you were to divide an Earth year into 360 degrees each one would take roughly a day and each one would take almost exactly the same time. Early humans actually had a very similar problem because they were trying to fit 12 lunar cycles (354 days) into a year and had to figure out what to do with the remaining 11 days. For example, the Julian calendar, which we pretty much use to this day with only some very minor changes (we don't have a leap day once every 400 years), just bit the bullet and added these days onto random months.
I'm glad you sat down and worked out the details of this, because my eyes kind of glazed over after a certain point in that explanation. About two years for every one year on earth, got it. Some seasons are longer than others and one hemisphere is hotter. Got it. But what you say here makes a lot of sense.
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