New development - White House directs NASA to create time standard for the moon. Surprisingly not about a time zone though, so it doesn't directly affect this market.

@Shemetz Very big!

I think I agree with you that it wouldn’t constitute the formation of a time zone if the US were to unilaterally start using a “Coordinated Lunar Time”.

But I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about precisely why it wouldn’t be a time zone.

How would the market resolve if the Moon got an official timezone but it was one already used on earth, say everyone agrees to use UTC on the moon or so?

@SamuelHvidager An international agreement to use an Earth-based timezone on the Moon, such as UTC, would cause the market to resolve as “Moon will get a time zone first.”

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The trigger is for the international community to come to some consensus about the Moon, as opposed to the current status of each Moon mission using the time zone of the entity that launched it.

I didn’t list any qualifications on the type of time zone of the Moon, so I think this is the fairest interpretation (as well as the most interesting). I’d be curious to know if there are other thoughts on this, though.

Very interesting market

Related market: https://manifold.markets/themightysalmon/will-the-number-of-time-zones-on-ea?r=dGhlbWlnaHR5c2FsbW9u

Just before Covid, EU was preparing to retire CEST and switch to CEDT throughout the year. I suppose this should qualify as losing a time zone. The plans were delayed by Covid and then the war in Ukraine.

On the Moon side, I'd be surprised if they simply wouldn't agree on using UTC.

@OlegEterevsky Interesting, I hadn't heard about those EU plans.

Just to clarify: that switch, if and when it is enacted, would not cause this market to resolve. There are plenty of other countries on UTC+1 and UTC+2, so the Earth as a whole would not gain or lose any time zones.

By contrast, the market would resolve if the EU decided for some reason to switch to UTC+1:30, as no country currently uses that particular offset (thankfully).

@themightysalmon CEST is not just UTC+1, it's also a standard for when the switch to summer time happens. There are African countries that use UTC+1 time zone, but to my knowledge none of them switch to summer time. I suppose it's a bit of a grey area if this should count as a separate time zone.

@OlegEterevsky I was really hoping to avoid precisely this type of gray area when I excluded summer time switches in the market description. The intention was to treat EU countries on UTC+1 during the winter as the same “time zone” as the African ones on UTC+1 year-round, since they share the same “Standard Time.”

Edit: added “year-round”

@themightysalmon Sorry, my bad. I should have read the description more closely. If you are only counting the offsets compared to UTC, then it's unambiguous.

@OlegEterevsky No worries, I probably should have made that caveat more prominent. But yes, I mean to count the UTC offsets.

@OlegEterevsky just a bit of pedantry: I presume the EU moving to year-round DST would apply to the entire Union, including Portugal and Atlantic islands that use UTC and eight member States that use UTC+2. Meaning, it's not just CET that would go, but also WET and EET.