[LEAPSECS] What timekeeping system should the Terra Nova settlers use?

[Daniel R. Tobias]

I watched the premiere episode of "Terra Nova", a new science fiction 
TV series, last week.  The premise is that people are escaping a 
dystopian future (of the overpopulated, overpolluted, repressive sort 
standard in sci-fi movies at least as far back as "Soylent Green") by 
going through a time-tunnel to join a settlement being established in 
the time of the dinosaurs (supposedly in an alternate timeline, so 
they won't cause paradoxes by stepping on a butterfly or something).  
In that time, the Moon is much closer to Earth, as is shown in a 
nighttime scene.  However, nothing has been mentioned yet about the 
length of the day, but it was shorter than the current day, which 
would, I imagine, have an impact on timekeeping in this colony.

How would the people on this list who advocate for various treatments 
of future timekeeping in our own world deal with that situation?  On 
the one hand, it's of great importance to the settlers' lives that 
they coordinate their time in some manner with the local solar time; 
the presence of nocturnal predators in the neighborhood of the 
settlement make it very important to know when sunset will come, in 
addition to the normal expected desire of people to run their lives 
so that they mostly work when it's light and sleep when it's dark.  
On the other hand, I expect they have a good deal of gadgetry and 
scientific instruments which probably have dependencies on 
frequencies and interval timing that are based firmly on the SI 
second.  So how would you reconcile this if you were the leader of 
this colony?

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