I see three main issues:
- defining a time system for on and orbiting the moon
- accounting for the astronomical and relativistic differences
- defining the time visible on earth
The first seems tractable, and relatively boring.
The second is well known from physical principles, but the details are probably difficult to resolve.
The third I simply don't understand. Imagine sending pings between the earth and moon. If someone sends ping
1 the earth at time t, the signal will take 1s to reach the moon, and an instantaneous ping
2 response would arrive back on earth at time t+2. Earth then sends ping
3.
At what time do all parties agree the ping
1 received on the moon?
At what time do all parties agree the ping
2 received on earth?
At what time do all parties agree the ping
3 received on the moon?
There are already analogies on earth. For example, the high frequency trading mob have to deal with the latency between Chicago, New York and London - and use it to their benefit during arbitrage trades. On a smaller scale, the path delay across a modern IC is much longer than the gate delay, and can be several clock cycles.
Leslie Lamport's seminal papers had something to say about this back in 1978
http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdfHe won a Turing Award for that!
https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm