Shabbat (and other times) on Mars

[cellio]

I was recently asked about this, and I don't know what the current thinking is.

The question of when an astronaut observes Shabbat (while in space) is well-understood. [1] But what happens when we colonize other planets and your hometown is on Mars? Do you count six Mars-days and observe the seventh as Shabbat? How long is a month (and how do you decide which moon)? Is it still desirable to stay in sync with Earthly seasons, or will that go out the window? If you follow the sun as locally experienced, what happens when that causes hardship? (Does the lunar colony observe one ~29-day Shabbat every seven months?) There must be commentary on this by now from sources other than Wandering Stars, but I don't know what the popular opinion is.

[1] I know of three opinions for the astronaut in space: follow your hometown, follow the city from which you launched (your port of departure, like for ships), or follow Jerusalem. All of these involve a ~25-hour Shabbat every seven days, like on Earth, even though your orbit might cause you to see a 90-minute day. But the astronaut is, by definition, just visiting.

Comments

[geekosaur]

At one point when I was having sleep issues, my "circadian" rhythm was running about 2 1/2 days; I suspect people could adapt to different physical days, up to a point (let's not think about Yom Kippur when the day is 36 hours, hm?).

[goljerp]

Hmm... I wonder how far the average person could adapt happily. Just because people could adapt to 36 hour days, would they want to? I seem to recall that you didn't seem too happy in your lj posts when you were on a 2.5 day cycle, but maybe that was just because you were trying to live in a world where everyone else was on a 24 hour cycle?

[geekosaur]

Yeh, the frustrating part was being out of synch with everything else. Hard to go shopping at 3am when there's nothing open nearby and no buses, for example.