Not to rain on your parade but:

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-scientists-oceans-mars-deep.html

Using seismic activity to probe the interior of Mars, geophysicists have found evidence for a large underground reservoir of liquid water—enough to fill oceans on the planet’s surface.

It’s located in tiny cracks and pores in rock in the middle of the Martian crust, between 11.5 and 20 kilometers below the surface. Even on Earth, drilling a hole a kilometer deep is a challenge.

Ain’t nobody getting to that water anytime soon.

For the usability of the clock, likely nothing.

I did mention In another comment that there are a number of advantages a round clockface provides to the creation of the clock, however.

Yea that’s kind of what I was thinking when I said eventually handwriting will go the same way.

If people never encounter it and do all their writing on keyboards, it’ll eventually be a useless skill as well.

From a practicality standpoint, a round clockface is easier to create a mechanical drive system for.

You can create a digital mechanical face (see: Flipboard style numerical displays) but they usually require more gears and are more susceptible to wear and tear than the gears of a round clock face.

The simplest designs for mechanical digital displays actually just take 24 hour and 60 minute/second circular displays and hide the other numerals as the clock face spins around. Technically this I suppose counts as both analog and digital?

Example:

As for electronic displays? Nah not much of a reason to use a round display unless again, you have an electric-mechanical drive and want to save on gears and parts.

It floors me just how many people in this thread feel like analog clock reading is a useless/outdated skill.

But I’m of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a truly outdated and useless skill, so I’m not sure I have the capability to empathize with those people…

How so?

I genuinely don’t understand the clock-face-reading-is-a-useless-skill opinion so both seem equally important to me.

There’s nothing stopping an analog clock face from representing 24h time:

I wonder how many people feel this way about writing when everyone just types/texts everything.

Why are they targeting Zenimax so heavily, don’t they have 50 other acquisitions they can suck the blood from