Time

Year

The year is 2066.

You’d think “wow, lots of wild, impressive future tech must be occurring on the moon” but actually: the moon’s distance from Earth and low population mean that it’s something of a backwater, mostly using wildly dated technology from around the time of the moon base’s initial 20-year design phase on Earth, between the years of 1995 and 2015.

Time Keeps on Ticking

The Moon enjoys an (almost) 15 Earth-day “day” and an almost 15 Earth-day “night” cycle, with a full Moon day taking a moon-th. Er-month.

The Moon orbits the Sun along with the Earth, so a Moon year and an Earth year are the same year, and the Moon’s days are the Earth’s months. So, May 5th on the Moon is “about 16% of the way through the fifth Moon-day of the year.” I hate moon-days.

Being as Moon-days take 1 Earth month each, and Paradise Lua is located in a place with constant sunlight, they are not terribly useful for human circadian rhythms. Also: the surface of the moon comes with constant bombardment of dangerous cosmic radiation, so the windows are not left open. Instead, Paradise Lua has its own day/night cycle enforced with artificial lights, synchronized with their original home base in Henderson, Nevada (Pacific Standard Time).

Timekeeping on Paradise Lua is almost all done in 24-hour time: “we’ll meet at 18-hundred” is the common parlance.

A day on Paradise Lua looks like:

• 0-8:00: Night
• 6:00-8:00: Dawn
• 8:00-18:00: Day
• 20:00-22:00: Evening
• 22:00-24:00: Night

At Night, lights are generally turned most of the way out in most public places, with just enough soft, recessed light to navigate safely.

During Dawn and Evening, lights are slowly cranked up to full power, and during the Day, all of the lights are turned on.

In some areas, like the Heavy Industrial Zone, light is simply left on full, all the time: many of the factories there simply run 100% of the time with rotating shifts.

In some areas, like the Overflow Slums, lights are left on low, all the time. Why waste electricty on the impoverished? A lot of people in Overflow work graveyard shifts in the HIZ, anyways, and appreciate that they can go to sleep at any hour.

Seasons

The Moon doesn’t have an axial tilt in the same way as the Earth, so there are no natural seasons.

However, researchers discovered that people start to feel unmoored in time without an orderly procession of yearly milestones, like birthdays and major holidays, so, in order to help with this, a season cycle is broadly implemented on the Moon, corresponding approximately with the seasons in Nevada, USA.

This means that the ambient temperature and light cycle gets colder and darker in the “winter” and hotter and brighter in the “summer”. The HVAC system is programmed to feel more humid in the “spring” and “fall”.

Lifecycles of the Rich and Famous

About 500 people are required to maintain a genetically diverse breeding pool.

Paradise Lua keeps its population at around 1500 people, generally.

A Generation is 20 years long, and Paradise Lua is currently on its third-ish Generation.

In order for a population to remain stable, enough people have to have children to offset the people who don’t - because they’re incapable, dead, or simply not interested.

In developed countries, this rate is about 2.1 children per woman. On Paradise Lua, this number is quite a bit higher, because the death rate is quite a bit higher: Paradise Lua’s government targets 4 children per woman. That is a lot.

There are about 75 children per year.

In general, Paradise Lua would rather have too many new citizens rather than not enough, so there are generous incentives for citizens to be fruitful and multiply.

The death rate on Paradise Lua actually isn’t high enough for that prodigious procreative pace to be fully necessary: but the idea is, it’s easier to manage the death rate than it is to manage the birth rate, so Paradise Lua artificially inflates the death count in a handful of ways - dialing back health care, relaxing safety standards in the HIZ, keeping deaths inflated and the population of the base stable.

The Mortuactuaries who manage these numbers are instructed to keep their work extremely secret.