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Welcome to the rededicated Martian Time website.
The original site came into existence about 1997, a time of convergence of the explosion of public use of the World Wide Web and the landing of the Sojourner rover, the first spacecraft to explore the surface of Mars since the Vikings of the 1970s. Although the ARPANET had been available to professionals for many years, for the first time the general public could receive information about an ongoing mission in near-realtime on the Internet, and people could share their aspirations regarding future human exploration and eventual colonization of Mars. Mars became more than an object of scientific investigation, it became a public thing, a res publica, and many were inspired to develop clocks and calendars that people might use on Mars someday to regulate the tempo of their lives according to the natural rhythms on this new world.
During the next two decades the Martian Time website moved around the Internet from one host server to another, while many of its external links went dead over the years as the websites they referenced were deleted. Fortunately, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine preserved many of these lost websites. About 90 percent of them have now been retrieved; more than 40 webpages have been resurrected and added to the Martian Time "boneyard." There are more than 60 external links, although some of them are dead at present and an effort will be made to retrieve them from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
The most recent additions (2020) are an excerpt from the Annals of the Lowell Observatory regarding the Martian calendar in use there in 1900, and William H. Pickering's 44 "Reports on Mars" from 1914 to 1930, which made extensive use of a Martian calendar.
On this website can be found ideas contributed by engineers, astronomers, planetary scientists, science fiction authors, students, and people with no particular credentials; of all of these, some with useful ideas and some otherwise. All of their thinking, from the 19th century to the 21st century, is preserved here, the thinking of the earthbound who have believed in the inevitability of a future for humankind on Mars. This is our bequest to those future generations.
But I see Mars reflecting in my little boy’s brown eyes
And he says Mama I’m gonna get there someday
Mama I’m gonna get there someday
And I say fly... I know you can fly
"Mars" by Lori McKenna, 2001
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