OK, Elon Musk isn’t planning to explicitly kill New Year’s Eve, but that will be a natural consequence of his Martian colonization plans, and for the first time we’ll have to abandon much of our culture and customs.
Even today, when we emigrate to new lands, we take our beliefs, our habits . When we meet native peoples, we end up influencing each other, which eventually generates localization phenomena, when local people bring external beliefs into their reality.
This occurs, for example, in Christian iconography in Africa. and in Japan. Jabá: I wrote a great article about it here.
Nativity, Japanese version (Credit: Contraditorium)
Along with beliefs, we take our calendars, and how we live on a planet only, December 25th and December 25th, at most we import the symbols of the Northern Hemisphere without thinking too much, bad luck for shopping Santas who have to wear that stuffy outfit in the summer.
One African nativity scene (Credit: Contraditorium)
This s inchronicity of commemorative dates will not be possible on Mars.
The poor operators of Martian probes and robots already suffer, each day they have to wake up half an hour earlier, because the Martian day has 24 hours , 37 minutes and 22 seconds long. Even if you arbitrarily define January 1 on Earth as January 1 on Mars, the days will quickly get out of sync.
To make matters worse, the Martian year has 687 days.
A future Martian colony, Elon Musk’s or not, would have its local time and its Earth time, but how would we do with holidays, common or religious? Will Martian children celebrate Christmas twice a year? And how do we count the time, will they have a birthday only once every 687 days?
Santa Claus, I have no doubt that he will visit the children of Mars, if he manages to visit all the children from Earth in one night, it’s not much of a problem to install an Epstein propulsion and hop on Mars.
Yea, the movie exists, it’s from 1964. And guess what: A remake will come out in 2022! (Credit: Internet Reproduction)
What will be more complicated is keeping the holidays that involve terrestrial ephemeris. No solstice-related holidays make sense on Mars. There is no reason to celebrate on Mars the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere of the Earth.
Fast forward a few hundred years and we will have human colonies in the clouds of Venus, on Ceres, and eventually even on Europa and Titan. Each of these colonies will have its own calendar, and while official affairs still use the Earth calendar, on a day-to-day basis these colonists will have very little incentive to worry about Earth and its holidays.
What the sociological effect of this is, nobody knows. Space tends to complicate our traditions and rituals, says Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor Al Masrie bin Sheikh Mustapha, a Malaysian astronaut who visited the Space Station in 2007.
A devout Muslim, he has the obligation to pray five times a day, kneeling on the ground and facing Mecca. Problem: Mecca is moving at 8Km/s relative to the Space Station.
A Malaysia’s Space Agency held a conference in 2006 with 150 Muslim scientists and members of the clergy to discuss this problem. The result was a very pragmatic document , where it is determined that the astronaut should position himself as best he can, and just stay towards Earth is enough.
Muslims in colonies outside Earth will have a problem; the gesture of the Muslim prayer, with the believer looking at the ground, is in this way to prevent him from unintentionally looking at the Sun or Moon, which are pagan objects of worship. Many times the Earth will be aligned with the Sun, and from the orbit of Jupiter, Earth and Moon occupy essentially the same place in space, the subject WILL “worship” the Moon, even unintentionally.
It is a common trope in science fiction for colonies to move rapidly away from Earth, usually with a good degree of hostility. Seeing how much of our culture depends on periodic events linked to our calendar, it is evident how the impossibility of transporting these events to another world can contribute to alienating this new society.
But it’s not for now. We can and should still celebrate New Year’s Eve, happy 2022 and in the words of Philosopher Peter Quincy Taggart…
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