Keeping Time across 120,000 light years

Yes, I loved Andor. It was such a breath of fresh air in the Star Wars universe. The kind of storytelling that made me feel like a kid again, waiting impatiently for my father to bring home VHS tapes of Episodes 5 and 6. I wouldn't call myself a die-hard fan, but I've always appreciated the original trilogy. After binging both seasons of Andor, I immediately rewatched Rogue One, which of course meant I had to revisit A New Hope again.

And through it all, one thing kept nagging at me. One question I had. What time is it?

The "0200 Hours" Problem

In A New Hope, Han Solo, piloting the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace, casually mentions:

"We should be at Alderaan about 0200 hours."

And they are onto the next scene with R2D2. Except I'm like, wait a minute. What does "0200 hours" actually mean in an intergalactic civilization? When you're travelling through hyperspace between star systems, each with their own planets spinning at different rates around different suns, what does "2:00 AM" even refer to?

Bear with me, I'm serious. Time is fundamentally local. Here on Earth, we define a "day" by our planet's rotation relative to the Sun. One complete spin gives us 24 hours. A "year" is one orbit around our star. These measurements are essentially tied to our specific solar neighborhood.

So how does time work when you're hopping between solar systems as casually as we hop between time zones?

Before we go any further into a galaxy far, far away, let's look at how we're handling timekeeping right now as we begin exploring our own solar system.

Mars Time

NASA mission controllers for the Curiosity rover famously lived on "Mars Time" during their missions. A Martian day, called a "sol", is around 24 hours and 40 minutes long. To stay synchronized with the rovers' daylight operations, mission control teams had their work shifts start 40 minutes later each Earth day.

They wore special watches that displayed time in Mars sols instead of Earth hours. Engineers would arrive at work in California at what felt like 3:00 AM one week, then noon the next, then evening, then back to the middle of the night. All while technically working the "same" shift on Mars. Families were disrupted. Sleep schedules were destroyed. And of course, "Baby sitters don't work on Mars time." And this was just for one other planet in our own solar system.

One team member described it as living "perpetually jet-lagged." After several months, NASA had to abandon pure Mars time because it was simply unsustainable for human biology. Our circadian rhythms can only be stretched so much.

Lunatics Time Keeping

With the Artemis missions planning to establish a continuous human presence on the Moon, NASA and international space agencies are now trying to define an even more complicated system: Lunar Standard Time.

A lunar "day", from one sunrise to the next, lasts about 29.5 Earth days. That's roughly 14 Earth days of continuous sunlight followed by 14 Earth days of darkness. You obviously can't work for two weeks straight and then hibernate for two more.

But that's not all. On the moon, time itself moves differently. Because of the moon's weaker gravity and different velocity relative to Earth, clocks on the Moon tick at a slightly different rate than clocks on Earth. It's a microscopic difference (about 56 microseconds per day), but for precision navigation, communication satellites, and coordinated operations, it matters.

NASA is actively working to create a unified timekeeping framework that accounts for these relativistic effects while still allowing coordination between lunar operations and Earth-based mission control. And again, this is all within our tiny Earth-Moon system, sharing the same star.

If we're struggling to coordinate time between two bodies in the same gravitational system, how would an entire galaxy manage it?

Coruscant Standard Time

In Star Wars the solution, according to the expanded universe lore, is this:

"A standard year, also known more simply as a year or formally as Galactic Standard Year, was a standard measurement of time in the galaxy. The term year often referred to a single revolution of a planet around its star, the duration of which varied between planets; the standard year was specifically a Coruscant year, which was the galactic standard. The Coruscant solar cycle was 368 days long with a day consisting of 24 standard hours."

So the galaxy has standardized on Coruscant, the political and cultural capital, as the reference point for time. We can think of it as Galactic Greenwich Mean Time, with Coruscant serving as the Prime Meridian of the galaxy.

This makes a certain amount of political and practical sense. Just as we arbitrarily chose a line through Greenwich, England, as the zero point for our time zones, a galactic civilization would need to pick some reference frame. Coruscant, as the seat of government for millennia, is a logical choice.

But I'm still not convinced that it is this simple. Are those "24 standard hours" actually standard everywhere, or just on Coruscant? Let's think through what Galactic Standard Time would actually require:

1. Every Planet Has Different Time

Tatooine has a different rotation period than Coruscant. Hoth probably has a different day length than Bespin. Some planets might have extremely long days (like Venus, which takes 243 Earth days to rotate once). Some might rotate so fast that "days" are meaningless. Gas giants like Bespin might not have a clear surface to even define rotation against.

For local populations who never leave their planet, this is fine. They just live by their star's rhythm. But the moment you have interplanetary travel, trade, and military coordination, you need a common reference frame.

2. Relativistic Time Dilation

This was too complicated for me to fully grasp, but here is how I understood it. The theory of relativity tells us that time passes at different rates depending on your velocity and the strength of the gravitational field you're in.

• A clock on a planet with stronger gravity runs slower than one on a planet with weaker gravity
• A clock on a fast-moving ship runs slower than one on a stationary planet
• Hyperspace travel, which somehow exceeds the speed of light, would create all kinds of relativistic artifacts

We see this in our own GPS satellites. They experience time about 38 microseconds faster per day than clocks on Earth's surface because they're in a weaker gravitational field, even though they're also moving quickly (which slows time down). Both effects must be constantly corrected or GPS coordinates would drift by kilometers each day.

Now imagine you're the Empire trying to coordinate an attack. One Star Destroyer has been orbiting a high-gravity planet. Another has been traveling at relativistic speeds through deep space. A third has been in hyperspace. When they all rendezvous, their clocks will have drifted.

How much? Well, we don't really know the physics of hyperspace or the precise gravitational fields involved, so we can't say. But it wouldn't be trivial.

3. Light-Speed Communication Lag

Even if you had perfectly synchronized clocks, there's still the problem of knowing what time it is elsewhere.

Light takes time to travel. A lot of time. Earth is about 8 light-minutes from the Sun. Meaning if the Sun exploded right now, we wouldn't know for 8 minutes. Voyager 1, humanity's most distant spacecraft, is currently over 23 light-hours away. A signal from there takes nearly a full Earth day to reach us.

The Star Wars galaxy is approximately 120,000 light-years in diameter (according to the lore again). Even with the HoloNet (their faster-than-light communication system), there would still be transmission delays, signal degradation, and the fundamental question of "which moment in time are we synchronizing to?"

If Coruscant sends out a time signal, and a planet on the Outer Rim receives it three days later, whose "now" are they synchronizing to?

4. The Reference Frame Problem

In relativity, there is no universal "now." Time is not an absolute, objective thing that ticks uniformly throughout the universe. It's relative to your frame of reference.

On Earth, we all roughly share the same frame of reference, so we can agree on UTC and time zones. But in a galaxy with millions of worlds, each moving at different velocities relative to each other, each in different gravitational fields, with ships constantly jumping through hyperspace. Which frame of reference do you pick?

You could arbitrarily say "Coruscant's reference frame is the standard," but that doesn't make the physics go away. A ship traveling at near-light-speed would still experience time differently. Any rebel operation requiring split-second timing would fall apart.

How Star Wars Characters Actually Use Time

Despite all this complexity, the characters in Star Wars behave as if time is simple and universal. They "seem" to use a dual-time system:

Galactic Standard Time (GST)

This would be for official, galaxy-wide coordination:

• Military operations ("All fighters, attack formation at 0430 GST")
• Senate sessions and government business
• Hyperspace travel schedules
• Banking and financial markets
• HoloNet news broadcasts

When Mon Mothma coordinates with Rebel cells across the galaxy in Andor, they're almost certainly using GST. When an X-Wing pilot gets a mission briefing, the launch time is in GST so the entire fleet stays synchronized.

Local Planetary Time (LPT)

This is for daily life:

• Work schedules
• Sleep cycles
• Business hours
• Social conventions ("let's meet for lunch")

The workday on Ferrix follows Ferrix's sun. A cantina on Tatooine opens when Tatooine's twin suns rise. A farmer on Aldhani plants crops according to Aldhani's seasons.

A traveler would need to track both. Like we carry smartphones with clocks showing both home time and local time. An X-Wing pilot might wake up at 0600 LPT (local dawn on Yavin 4) for a mission launching at 1430 GST (coordinated across the fleet).

The "Night" Problem

This is something I couldn't let go when watching the show. In Andor, Cassian often references "night" and "day". Saying things like "we'll leave in the morning" or "it's the middle of the night."

When someone on a spaceship says "it's the middle of the night," or even "Yesterday," what do they mean? There's no day-night cycle in space. They're not experiencing a sunset.

The most logical explanation is that they've internalized the 24-hour Coruscant cycle as their personal rhythm. "Night" means the GST clock reads 0200, and the ship's lights are probably dimmed to simulate a diurnal cycle, helping regulate circadian rhythms. "Morning" means 0800 GST, and the lights brighten.

Space travelers have essentially become Coruscant-native in terms of their biological and cultural clock, regardless of where they actually are. It's an artificial rhythm, separate from any natural cycle, but necessary for maintaining order and sanity in an artificial environment.

Don't Think About It Too Hard

I really wanted to present this in a way that makes sense. But the truth is, realistic galactic timekeeping would be mind-numbingly complex. You'd somehow need:

• Relativistic corrections for every inhabited world's gravitational field
• Constant recalibration for ships entering and exiting hyperspace
• A faster-than-light communication network that somehow maintains causality
• Atomic clock networks distributed across the galaxy, all quantum-entangled or connected through some exotic physics
• Sophisticated algorithms running continuously to keep everything synchronized
• Probably a dedicated branch of the Imperial bureaucracy just to maintain the Galactic Time Standard

It would make our International Telecommunication Union's work on UTC look like child's play.

But Star Wars isn't hard science fiction. It's a fairy tale set in space. A story about heroes, empires, and rebellions. The starfighters make noise in the vacuum of space. The ships bank and turn like WWII fighters despite having no air resistance. Gravity works the same everywhere regardless of planet size.

So when Han Solo says "0200 hours," just pretend he is in Kansas. We accept that somewhere, somehow, the galaxy has solved this complex problem. Maybe some genius inventor in the Old Republic created a McGuffin that uses hyperspace itself as a universal reference frame, keeping every clock in the galaxy in perfect sync through some exotic quantum effect.

Maybe the most impressive piece of technology in the Star Wars universe isn't the Death Star, which blows up. Or the hyperdrive, which seems to fail half the time. The true technological and bureaucratic marvel is the invisible, unbelievably complex clock network that must be running flawlessly, constantly behind the scene across 120,000 light years. It suggests deep seated control, stability and sheer organizational power for the empire. That might be the real foundation of real galactic power hidden right there in plain sight.

... or maybe the Force did it!

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Maybe I took this a bit too seriously. But along the way, I was having too much fun reading about how NASA deals with time, and the deep lore behind Star Wars. I'm almost starting to understand why the Empire is trying to keep those pesky rebels at bay.

I enjoyed watching Andor. Remember, Syril is a villain. Yes, you are on his side sometimes, they made him look human, but he is still a bad guy. There I said it. They can't make a third season because Rogue One is what comes next. But I think I've earned the right to just enjoy watching Cassian Andor glance at his chrono and say "We leave at dawn", wherever and whenever that is.

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