Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?
And instead changing the time work and other things happens depending on where you are. Would be easier to arrange meetings across the globe. Same thing applies to summertime. You may start work earlier if you want, but dont change the clocks!
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones
In a nutshell:
Before abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.
It's probably best not to call right now.
After abolishing time zones:
I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?
It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here.
Does that mean I can call him?
I don't know.
We could all just cover our windows, take Vitamin D supplements and actually all live on the UTC timezone.
And let the brits enjoy UTC+0 like nothing happened while the rest of the word scrambles to adapt to the new time system? This is tyranny! I demand a new system where my region is the one with UTC+0 instead!
Have UTC+0 run horizontally, instead.
And increase its width to run from +80° to -80°.
Squeeze the rest of the timezones into the poles
No! In summer time we'd be a whole hour out of our natural time! It would be too much to handle.
I lived in a tiny apartment with a streetlamp just outside my only window. Even with blackout curtains that room had no day/night cycle. I'm still trying to get back on a normal day/night cycle, fifteen years later.
So, that's another method you could try.
In one of these stories you used Google and in the other you didn't. Both of these problems are solveable with Google
You already have to Google for what time it is in another part of the world, and Google can also tell you when sunup, solar noon, sundown, and midnight are in Melbourne, so it sounds like you aren't any worse off without time zones.
If you actually want to know if the sun is up somewhere else, then you want a world clock. At a glance visibility on the current position of the sun for every location on the globe, no time zones necessary.
Just add 11 to utc.
No harder than having different times in different places.
I am too late. I knew this would be the top post, even though the arguments brought forth in the blog post are utterly stupid. I would even go so far as to say their arguments are presented in bad faith, because I refuse to believe the author actually thinks that's how it would go. (They have some seriously awesome posts, I most highly recommend https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)
With time zones:
you Google what the timzone offset is (aka at which point in your local timezone the sun rises over there). Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
Without times zones: you Google at which time the sun rises over there. Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
It's literally the same process.
Ah yes, sunrise. That things that never ever changes depending on the time of year or location on the planet. Very dependable and memorizable thing, the sunrise.
Uh, yeah? Because it defines your circadian rhythm?
The arguments are exactly the same. It basically boils down to the philosophy if you want the daily life to be controlled by clocks or by the natural sleep/wake cycle of the body.
Some prefer by the clock, because it provides a fixed constant, even if it may run counter to our very nature. You very well may prefer that. Others argue for a more natural sleep cycle, especially when it comes to school for example. Complaints about work starting too early are not exactly rare either.
Huh, you know what? I think you're right.
Yeah, which makes the points, it's non trivial to know when to contact people with timezones anyways. The time zone only adds more complexity.
I think the point is that people's routine isn't tied to sunrise. For example, in the summertime I start work about 4 hours after sunrise, and in the winter I start work 20mins after sunrise. The difference would actually be more dramatic without daylight savings With timezones and modern internet you don't need to look up the offset at all, you just look up the current time in that zone and decide if that's an appropriate time to call. Speaking as someone who deals with timezones a fair bit, both in work and personal life. And as someone who understands the headache of dealing with them in international computer systems, the time zone system is a very nice compromise. Though daylight savings need to die
If your start time has a 4 hour swing, how could you just look up your local time and make a choice to call?
Just coordinate via asynchronous communication to schedule a time. It's not 1935.
You: "hey uncle text me when it would be a good time to have a call"
6 hours later
Uncle: "hey i just got up, lets have a call at 4:50"
You: "thats a bid late for me, im in bed by 4:00, what about 3:30?"
Uncle: "sure sounds great"
No one needed to know anything about when people wake up, where on earth they live, etc.
Problem solved. This actually makes it problem simpler. With different time zones:
With one time zone:
Exactly, it always requires knowing your uncles habits.
No shit, so no difference to the current situation.
We have GMT/UTC for that purpose.
But do you want to see your clock at 02:00 and say "time to go to work"?
Apart from feeling temporarily (ha!) weird at changing a habit, no. I prefer 02:00 no more or less than any other arbitrary number, really.
Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.
What do you mean no shared concept of time. Just because the numbers are different doesn't mean they don't have time. Most of the time when telling stories people just say "the morning" anyways.
Oh no, you have to remember like 2 numbers for wake up and going to bed? Or one offset to shift it? Different cultures already do things like start work at different times and eat dinner at different local times. So it will be no different than "people tend to eat dinner here around 19:00" then "people tend to eat dinner at 04:00 here". Having relatively consistent local times may be able to give you a rough approximation, but so will just subtracting 9 hours or whatever the conversion happens to be.
But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.
Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.
[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.
You know, I was very much agreeing to OP, until your comment. You make a convincing point.
I think we can all agree that daylight savings needs to die though.
The offsets would only be used for computer actions like "snooze until tomorrow" or configuring the default time that day/night mode switches. It would be a fairly rare occurrence. In day-to-day life people wouldn't really think about that. Talking about times using consistent numbers would be incredibly valuable when communicating with people in different places which is becoming more and more common as our world becomes more connected. (How many people have a friend or family overseas? Probably the majority of people)
Making the "default" way of thinking about time globally consistent would be amazing for communication.
I agree that the incredibly painful transition wouldn't be worth it. I just think that assuming we did make the transition, the end result would be better.
But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.
When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.
But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.
Yes, there is an offset somewhere, but the questions is what is more useful.
My main argument is that talking about global times is more convenient and more useful most of the time. Sure, if you are scheduling a meeting you still need to consider when the person is awake/working but that is no harder with global time and in fact can be much easier. But most importantly at the end it is very obvious what time you picked and if it works for everyone. If you say "let's meet at 18:00" and I usually get to work at 19:00 that sets of red flags right away. If I agree to meet at 10:00 $city I need to do math to confirm that. Also I would much rather everyone just give me "working hours" in global time when trying to schedule across multiple people, rather than having to juggle working hours + time zones for each participant.
I think the concrete difference comes down to which of these properties is more important to you:
Personally 1 is far more valuable to me. It seems that 2 is minor even now, but will be mostly solved by language as well. Sure, our current ability to approximate someone's schedule probably won't be perfectly matched even with new language. But it seems like the delta will not be enough to outweigh the benefits of 1.
Sure, that's nice, but I'm sure language would quickly adapt. You can always say "very early" and I'm sure that we will get used to talking about local times more as this happens. As it is this still may not be that notable if I don't know that you work night shifts. Languages would evolve and I don't think it would be any worse, just different.
I think it would be better to think of it as, "Do we want everyone to have the same general idea of what 5pm means? Or to have everyone be on one time?"
Edit: I know it's an imperfect question as northern/southern latitudes can get dark sooner/later than the other pending the season. But 5pm to a Californian is going to feel very different than to a German if we're all on one time.
Those are just my thoughts, though.
We'd get used to it. In China they only use one timezone across the whole country, and they just accept that daylight is at different times in the East versus the West
94% of the population of China lives in east of the heihe-tengchong line, which means that for 94% of the population the timezone is at most 1 hour off of the "true" time, which is pretty normal.
Half of Canada's population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor, but we still use like 7 separate time zones.
Also that 6% you're leaving out is more than twice Canada's population.
Half of Canada's population is less than the population of New York State. Y'all tiny. Maybe more people would live there if it wasn't a frozen wasteland.
Aww, you're cute.
Kinda like half the world knows December - March as winter but the other half knows of it as Summer
Months and seasons are much simpler because it's always a 6 month offset rather than anywhere between 1-24 hours depending on location. It also doesn't affect scheduling as much. If you're interacting with someone on the other hemisphere, the outside weather generally doesn't affect your decision in any meaningful way.
Yeah but somewhere between 87-90% of the population is in the northern hemisphere so for the vast majority December - March = Winter. Although I guess depending on local climate it might be more like dry vs rainy season, or not much difference between "winter" and "summer".
UTC is most universal, as it's kinda constant (by lack of/knowing a better word). GMT has DST, so that time changes twice a year, UTC is used as base for all timezones, no matter if and when they have DST.
In the military Zulu is used as name for UTC.
TIL, thanks.
yep, zulu time as we called it in the army
I think if I had to wake up to the moon to write emails and make spreadsheets until sun up so my boss could read them in sunlight from their balcony I would cause dire problems.
It's literally just a number and doesn't make any tangible difference.
The trouble is that "2 AM" now means radically different things depending on where in the world you are, and you lose any ability to be able to intuitively reason about the time in other parts of the world from you.
But now your talking about something else unrelated to what time you get up for work.
You mean like UTC? That thing we already have?
Yeah, what if we had that... but different... but the same?
Like the Good Place's plan to make larger mini doughnuts that weren't just regular doughnuts.
It's a cool idea, but then you lose the local representation of the daylight cycle, which just complicates things again as you try to schedule things with people in other countries without knowing if it's their bedtime or not.
I play games with international friends and work with international colleagues, so I have my fair share of troubles with time zones. If anything, abolishing daylight savings worldwide would yield much better results.
On a side note, when scheduling events on Discord, I like to add in a unix timestamp that shows everybody their local time. Quite convenient!
We already lost that with our 1-hour time zones and daylight savings. Clock time is no longer bound to solar time, and I think we're overdue for the retirement of local time.
Managing geographically-dispersed schedules on a single unified time standard isn't any more complicated than trying to remember everyone's time zones already is, and would likely reduce confusion overall since unlabeled timestamps would no longer be ambiguous.
If some manager wants to shift their workers' schedule to account for seasonal light availability? Then just fucking do that and don't make everyone have to run around manually updating all the clocks.
True, but time zones offer a good compromise between solar time and globally-synchronized time.
Having 12pm noon be approximately when the sun is highest in the sky is better than not at all, and still gives some form of regional cohesion in terms of timekeeping.
There are pretty extreme examples, of course; China is one entire UTC+8 time zone, and that means Tibet is still dark when Shanghai is wide awake, which is dumb, and as annoying as the US's 4 time zones is (not counting Alaska and Hawaii), it still makes regional sense.
Fuck daylight savings time.
Doing this would lose a sense of work vs home time for people. I have some coworkers on the other side of the world, I look at their time and know they shouldn't be online anymore. I tell them things like "Go be with your family" or "Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you".
It gives me a sense of humanity to know if it's 8pm their time, it's way too late for them to be working. I'm sure I could adjust if we all used UTC but it would be so stupid to change.
Also imagine hours for businesses all sounding weird as heck lol.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who does this sort of thing. I also have to scold some junior colleagues about working on their weekends from time to time. Spending all your time working is just a recipe for loneliness and burnout - I know from experience so, try to nudge others away from it.
You'll basically have timezones either way, there's just two ways of doing it.
If we all used UTC, then businesses would need to change what time they opened depending on their location. Ex: Best Buy opening at 12 noon on the US west coast, and 3pm on the east coast. Locations inbetween would have different opening times. So we would get the noon zone, 1pm zone, 2pm zone, and 3pm zone. All nation wide businesses with standard open/close times would effectively follow the same pattern, and it would be best if they all coordinated on where those zones occured. So then we would get new timezones, they'd just be slightly different in how they functioned.
Yes, the main question is picking between:
Personally I think 1 is more valuable because being able to easily and reliably talk about time seems more useful than being able to have my phone time show a number that lets me guess schedules when visiting a place.
I still don't get why this is better. You know that 2am people are in bed. No matter where in the world.
We do, it's called Universal Coordinated Time. The time is now 00:37 UTC, or 16:37 Pacific Daylight Savings Time.
We cant get Americans to use metric...
One big argument I keep hearing is that it would be too expensive.
It's honestly not that bad. The estimated cost is around $350 million. Now, that might sound like a lot but when you take into account that it's about $1 per person it doesn't seem so bad.
Now, if you consider the military budget of $480 Billion per year it seems even smaller.
It would take approximately 0.07% of the 2024 military budget to switch to metric.
I imagine almost a bigger issue than the cost would be the... what's the American equivalent of a Gammon?... you know, those people that wouldn't change to Metric if their life depended on it. Four rods to the hogshead was good enough for their grandpappy and no filthy pinko liberal commie will get them to change. The ones that still don't wear seatbelts unless a cop is watching.
It's not cost, it's just apathy. For most people it would take a while to learn, especially since after school you're not really measuring that much in most jobs.
Step 1. Make all food packaging list both for a few years. That easy, just put it out there so it starts sinking in slowly.
I mean why?
You could always start switching over then give up half way through. Then you'd be like your Grandpa England.
Pilots already do this. Everything in aviation is "ZULU" time. In computers, we call it UTC or +0000. It actually works really well because we cross time zones so easily.
I would totally be in favor of switching to a universal time zone. But inertia is hard to overcome. Most people don't change time zones very often as they're usually far from population centers and people know that when they take a trip, that's when the time zone will change so for most it's not a daily concern and getting used to a new time zone model would be annoying. When you tell people about the US state of Indiana, they really start to change their minds, that place is fucked up.
Hint: Reykjavik, Iceland is a major city that uses UTC always, no Daylight Savings Time there. I always keep my second time zone on my watch and phone set to that.
For synchronizing of things like work and school we'd still end up with zones all using the same local hours (the day goes from 4:00 to 4:00 to e.g.) so we'd still end up with timezones there...
All of the clocks around the world would read the same, sure, but now you have no idea what part of the day 4:00 is somewhere else. You'd end up doing almost the same math as we do now by offsetting their time from yours so you could understand it (4:00 is the same as my 13:00 for e.g. so it's one hour past noon over there) but now we lose the shared understanding of which numbers correspond to which times of day. This means you'd be having to mentally convert all their new times of day to the clock time instead of having intuitive sense of their meaning.
Instead of seeing the local time is 12:00 and immediately knowing it's noon, now you'd look up what time their day started and see how many hours it's been since then (12, so it's noon there) and that offset is how you'd need to think of it and already what clocks show now...
People that proposes to replace local timezones with global UTC must be living in europe where it doesn't impact them much if we do abolish the timezone. Now consider people that lives in the other side of the planet. Most people are active during the day, yet for them, the day will end right in the afternoon under the new system. So you tell your friend "hey, let's meet tomorrow", then your friend would be like "do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?". No way people living in the asia pacific would accept this without military intervension.
I think they mean concepts like morning and evening, or day and night would remain. The difference would be that in London, midnight would be 12:00am, but in San Fransisco, midnight would be... 16:00 / 4:00pm. Each timezone would have to adjust the numbers, in the same way the southern hemisphere considers January to be in the summer.
isn't that just timezones with extra steps?
That's usually the case.
I live and work on London time. If I want to have a phonecall with someone in the Philippines, I have to be mindful that 9am for me is 5pm for them, so I'll need to make the effort to start early to catch them while they're still at work.
Without timezones: If I want to have a phonecall with someone in the Philippines, I have to be mindful that their working day is 1am to 9am, so I'll need to make the effort to start early to catch them while they're still at work.
I'll still need to lookup when their working day is, I'll still have to adjust/account for it, and I'll still have to get up early / start work early to make that call. Getting rid of timezones doesn't get rid of that +8 or the affects of that +8, it just renames how we communicate it.
I think the compromise would be the country/region that proposes global time should get the +12h offset. If the benefit really outweigh the pain for them, then they can deal with such a large offset themselves and spare the rest of the world from the brunt of the pain.
nah, a 12-hour offset is boring and easy to deal with. give them a 6-hour offset.
12h offset is where it causes the maximum confusion to society because the date changes right in the middle of the day. In our personal and professional live, we never considered the date can change right in the middle of the day, causing wide variety of minor inconvenience in our daily life. Some examples of minor inconveniences:
This is a very dismissive argument. I live in a time zone where the day number would roll over during my waking day. But I still think that it would be better overall. (But not worth the switching costs.)
It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. "Tomorrow" would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period. This issue already exists as people are often up at midnight and somehow we don't get confused when people say "I'll see you tomorrow" at 23:55. We know that they don't mean in 5min. This is just a source of jokes, but no one gets confused.
The real issue would be things like "want to meet on wednesday" if there is a transition during working hours or "want to go out for dinner on the 17th" if the day transition happens near dinner time. I think this would be the hardest part to adapt to, but language is a flexible thing and I doubt it would take long for it to adapt.
I still think the people that would benefit the most from this change are europeans. They are mostly borderless and often works across the member countries than spans 7 timezones, centered roughly around the utc. It's all benefits with very little downsides.
There are a whole loads of minor annoyances related to this, most of them would vary depending on the local culture. In addition to that, not all countries are sufficiently globalized to realize the benefits of universal time, especially 3rd world countries. People living in those countries will experiences all the drawback with none of the benefits in their daily live.
So when someone is doing this international meeting stuff they have to be very careful about saying “let’s look at this tomorrow” because in various places that can mean different things depending on when each person’s night is.
It would make checking the meeting time a little easier, but make scheduling it way way harder. When scheduling a meeting I want to try to make it reasonable for everyone in the meeting and without time zones I'd have to look up a unique table of when daytime is for every location. That sounds so much worse to me than having a standardized time offset where reasonable working hours are pretty consistently defined. And the main time where I need to check time zones are at scheduling time anyways. When it comes to checking the meeting time everything I use already automatically converts the time to my local time.
Because it:
causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
convolutes timetables, where present
means "days" are no longer the same as "days"
complicates both secular and religious law
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
is not simpler at all
That is a feature, it removes one thing to worry about.
Yes, I think this is the biggest argument against. It would take a long time to get used to.
How?
Same as point 2.
How?
How?
How? In my opinion it makes it easier.
Yes. This is true.
Of course it is simpler. You have just removed a huge source of complexity. It still isn't simple because people will still live their life at different times. But it is simpler.
Who gets to pick when "noon" is when the sun is usually above their head? Let's assume Greenwich for posterity sake. That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their "daytime" in traditionally nighttime hours. Thus spending your day (time when the sun is up) and your day (the time when you do your work) will not intuitively mean the same thing
Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law. At a minimum they'd have to rewrite those laws, at most it'd cause a literal schism
"We changed how clocks work for almost everyone on the planet to make some nerds' lives easier. Please go change your planners, clocks, schedules, applications, signs, etc to adjust"
In most of the world, you can reasonably assume the sun goes up around 7 am and sets around 7. Obviously that changes but you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time. In this new system you'll need to figure out what times people do most of their activities based off of geological segments of the planet and checking what their "daytime" is. Which is already a problem timezones address
On a base level maybe, but after fixing all the other problems it causes the resulting system would likely be just as if not more complicated than our current time system
No, no one would do this. You would continue living your life when the sun is up, the number on the clock would just be different.
So just continue doing this based on the previous schedule? Many religions still celebrate holidays based on alternate calendars and many holidays have strange rules for when they occur. This seems like an incredibly minor issue to me?
Yeah, I agree that the change would be so painful that it isn't worth it. I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.
This seems like a very artificial problem. When will you know their time previously but not their location or relative time of day. You will still know what people are doing. Just because you add the magic number based on their location in the world before consulting their schedule instead of after doesn't change anything. This only seems like a problem if you were magically teleported to another location underground and only have access to a clock.
It would be better for whichever countries near the 0 offset (eu if using utc), but massive downgrade for no real benefit for countries near +12h offset (asia pacific). This will be seen as another instance of the west flexing their global power and will take generations to adapt. But if the offset were reversed (asia pacific at 0, the west at +12h) things would go much smoother there.
I think it would be better everywhere. It may be slightly easier if your noon is close to solar noon but really other than Europe and Africa everyone would be in the same boat of having the day number roll over sometime during their waking day. This would probably be the biggest downside but seems like something that language would adapt to quickly. I live at -5 so my day would roll over at 19:00 solar time. So it isn't like my location is immune to the day rollover issue.
“it’s 2 everywhere, why aren’t you awake?”
We do (known as Zulu/Military time, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time Coordinated) but it's not convenient for the average person to use locally, so almost everyone defaults to whatever their time zone is.
Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.
Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.
Don't you need to do this anyways? Different businesses open at different times. Different people work at different times. In some countries restaurants and shops tend to open relatively later and in some they open relatively earlier.
Really it just saves a step. From:
To:
Sure, step 3 can often be guessed. (It is highly likely that a business is open at 14:00 local time) But you still need to look up an exact number to convert from local time to target time. So instead you just look up when they open (or what time businesses are usually open in that place).
Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.
Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.
Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?
I don't think we would entirely remove the concept of a timezone. Your computer would likely have some sort of proxy for "day time". Likely even some time offset from a reference. You would just talk in term of global time. But when you snooze an email "until tomorrow" your email client would still have some notion of "when I start work tomorrow" is.
I think you are sort of assuming that we will just be transported into this new world. But you have to account for the fact that language would adapt. With this mindset every change is a bad one. I agree that the transition would be incredibly painful. So painful that it almost certainly isn't worth it. But that doesn't mean that the other system is worse. It can be better, but too different to be worth adopting it.
I agree that this is probably the biggest issue. It would take a lot of getting used to. But I'm sure that our language would adapt. And if this is the biggest problem I will take it over not knowing what times people are talking about any day of the week.
Humans, generally, like to be awake when the sun is visible and asleep when it isn't. The way we structure our thinking about time, morning, noon, evening, night, are based on the position of the sun.
The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that's a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times
That is already the case in multinational companies. The problem of daytime here nighttime there but we need to meet is the same no matter what numbers their respective timepieces say.
Perhaps the answer is to reform the concept of the meeting to exist in a far less useful way. Meetings should be a series of prerecorded messages sent via email and played like a correspondence game of Chess.
This would be incredibly inefficient and annoying and perhaps be a catalyst to finally make the weekly update calls a goddamn email that just reads "nothing to report this week, still on schedule to meet Q2 goals" and I can finally get back to smoking weed and ignoring my work phone until 11 AM (sorry, 0635 Neo Standard Time) when I feel like making someone else more money than I'll ever own.
This is how it happens already with international companies, no?
It can be, yes, usually people attempt to be accommodating. I have a regular 8 AM meeting to collaborate with foreign colleagues for which it's a 4 PM meeting. Neither of us are happy about it, but that's compromise.
I think a universal timezone would end up exacerbating the issue of some areas deferring to the ideal time of wealthier areas
I see what you're saying, about the awareness and consideration of other timezones that is encouraged simply by having individual ones.
Fun fact: In 1793 France defined the metric time consisting in one single timezone, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The people never used it and everyone forgot about it. It was later renamed decimal time
We do. It's called swatch time.
(Seriously)
I was scrolling all the way down, looking for someone to mention Swatch Internet Time. I never got the hang of it, with regards to what beats related to various times of the day for myself, but I love the idea.
I really wish that had caught on. Were you a Phantasy Star Online player, by chance?
Lol. i was!
It wouldn't make it easier to arrange meetings because you'd have no clue if you were arranging the meeting for when people would be at work, have finished for the day, or fast asleep at night.
I think it would:
For example imagine two conversions:
vs
It isn't much difference, but it is easier.
Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:
Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00
Wed 0:00 - 12:00
Wed 23:00 - Thu 11:00
Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.
Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.
Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.
It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.
I'm a proponent of this myself. I think the big barrier to just using UTC everywhere is with the clock as a symbol: right now if you're watching a movie or a TV show and see someone's alarm going off at 6:00, you know "oh, they're a pretty early riser." If everyone used UTC, that time could be local noon, or the person could be late for work, out any number of other things.
That also applies to when people move to a new place; if I'm used to having lunch at 20:00 UTC and then move across the country, suddenly lunch is at 17:00 UTC. Symbols are really important to people, so I think these are both problematic. Meetings would be easier, but offline life would be harder.
Exactly, because right now knowing the time also tells you the time of day which is super important information. Getting rid of timezones is prioritising the wrong thing when we think about time: rarely do we care what the clock shows in a different place, we care about what it means.
Removing that meaning is a step backwards. There's no point having all of our clocks show the same number if that doesn't mean anything anymore.
Which is easier- looking up what time it is in Munich, or looking up what part of the day it is and the hours typically kept by people in Munich? What if you need to schedule a call with your business partners?
I feel like this is something that would only benefit well-off people in the developed world at the inconvenience of less well-off people around the world.
"This would make it easier to coordinate digital meetings with my colleagues at my international corporation!" Lol
We would need to know what the normal time to start work in our given region would be. Perhaps we should divide the world up into longitudinal strips to designate where and when stuff like work should start, so that everyone could be synced up. Yeah, that’s be a little weird at borders, but since everyone would be aware of the borders then they’d be aware of the differences across them.
Maybe we could also just offset their time in these zones from each other so that we could standardize the times with the approximate position of the sun! That way, you could know if a local time was meant to be during the day or at night. If we didn’t do that, you’d need to figure it out and adjust your thinking everytime you went anywhere, since “noon” would lose all meaning.
Of course, when there are advantages to having a single time be represented everywhere, maybe we could have a separate time “zone” that encompasses the entire world; and when people need it they could just reference that. Some kind of universal, coordinated time zone…
Oh look, we solved all the problems of your suggestion by re-inventing the current system. Funny, that.
EDIT: alright, without the snark, what I am saying here is: we will need time zones either way, so what’s easier to coordinate: shifting the actual clock time in each zone, or shifting every other possible schedule, every person’s perception of what happens when, with each zone change? And also, UTC or Coordinated Universal Time does provide you with a single, global, same-everywhere time to use for coordination. It’s just seen as nerdy to use it, so no one in civilian life really does. Which is why you gotta go google what time a game is releasing when it’s not in your time zone
As much as time is a constant thorn in my side, both time and timezones are a necessary evil.
Others have outlined some of the issues regarding time zones and the abolishment of them so I won't get into that. What I will say is that time keeping systems generally don't track time in your local timezone. Technology has long since given up on local time as a measurement. Almost all system clocks for computers, phones, pretty much anything electronic, is almost always stored in UTC, or a time code based on UTC.
And I can hear it now, someone saying " but the time on my $thing is $correctlocaltime, which is not UTC"
Yep, and that's where the magic happens. While the time is stored as UTC, it's displayed as local based on your device's time zone settings. In some cases, like with cellphones, the local timezone is set by GPS. The device gets a very very general idea of where you are from GPS, and sets your timezone appropriately. Windows will do this too based on location awareness, by default. I'm sure os x also does something similar.
When the time is displayed it takes the UTC system time and filters it through the UTC offset based on your timezone, and displays local time, factoring in daylight savings, if applicable.
We've silently converted to a single unified time globally, and nobody realizes it has happened because the user interface shows you what you want to see.
Precisely, timezones were the answer to OP's question. Before timezones every town set their clocks to their local noon as the time when the sun was at the highest point in the sky, which is actually quite a lot of difference even for really close towns. With timezones, everyone in the same time zone has the same clock regardless of where the sun is. We all have the exact same minutes on the clock and the hour is always kept relative to and according to UTC.
Do you really wanna live in the part of the world where sunrise happens at 2pm?
Grateful for this thread. Never thought about how its actually useful to have different zones to know whether to call or other things. Kinda makes a lot of sense
I use UTC for all of my logs. Keeps it less confusing.
That would make 9 to 5 jobs quite a challenge outside Europe and Africa...
You could address Daylight Savings Time by just having people set their own schedule, but it was generally seen as easier for the government to change the clocks.
As others have mentioned, there are typically schedules that are assumed based on time. It is easier from a social setting to keep time universal and adjust based on time zones. The context informed by local time is fast more useful than a standard time.
eh... do you really want to be scheduled to start work at 8am when 8am is mid-afternoon? me neither.
If we had a single time zone, we couldn't use "am" or "pm".
These mean ante-meridiem and post-meridiem. So, before midday and after midday. There would be no concept of midday linked to hours that could apply to all locations.
The most apropiate would be talking in 24h format. It wouldn't bother me if someone said I have to wake up at 13 and finish my job at 21. These are just numbers.
But yeha, it's still a bad idea because people would have to change calendars constantly because of daylight savings.
yeah I see what you mean. you'd have to replace all 12 hour clocks world-wide though - and then accept that it would take generations for people to adapt. it'd probably never going to happen.
What you do is you have both, kind of like we already do, but with the global time being the default rather than local time. So, if I were to look at my phone right now, it would say something like 1433 9:33AM.
When referencing the time to people I know to be local, I'd use the local time, but any time confusion could occur, I'd use the global time. We have everything in place already, we just need people to get used to knowing what time it is UTC
I doubt most people would use local time in their day-to-day life if global time is the default. You would just get used to the new schedule the same way that you have gotten used to the current one based on local time.
I do think that it might be useful to have something like a "world clock" when traveling. So your clock may say "14:33, like 09:33 at home". But I'm not even convinced how useful this would be. Once you remember one or two timeframe references or if you can see the sun you will have a rough idea of what time-of-day it is anyways. And generally the local schedule will vary a bit from your home schedule anyways so having exact local-equivalent time will probably not be that valuable.
I agree, and once people get used to it, we can phase local time out. But we'll definitely need it to begin with
There are lots of negative opinions in this thread. But I think it is actually a good idea!
It makes time math a lot easier. Of course the switching cost is very high. (And probably not worth it). Much like it would be better if we counted using base 12 it is a better system once the switch would be made.
The main upside is that it is very easy to agree on times. I've had job interviews missed because time math was done wrong. They told me my local time and the interviewer their local time but they didn't match! And it isn't obvious to either party. When I see "10:00 America/Toronto, 08:00 America/San Francisco" it isn't really obvious that there was an error here unless you happen to have the offset memorized. With a global time everyone would immediately agree on a time.
One common complaint is that you can no longer use "local time" to estimate if someone is available. But if anything I consider this a feature! Not everyone wakes up at 8 and is at work by 9. Some people prefer to have meetings later, some prefer earlier. Maybe it is best to stop assuming and just asking people. "Hey, what times do you like to take meetings at?" But even if you don't want to do that it is just as easy to look up "work hours in San Francisco" than it is to look up "current time in San Francisco". (In fact it may be easier since you don't need to then do math to find the offset and hope that daylight savings doesn't change the offset between when you look it up and when the event happens.) On top of that if someone schedules a meeting with you then you immediately know if it works well for you, because you know what times you like to have meetings at. IMHO it is much better to know the time of the meeting reliably than to try to guess if it is a good time for other parties. If the other parties can reliably know what time it is scheduled for they know if it is a good time for them, and can let you know if it isn't.
I think the real main downside is in how we talk about times and dates. Right now it is very common to say something like Feb 15th, 14:00-19:00. However if the day number changes during the day it can be a bit confusing. But honestly I'm sure we will get used to this quickly. Probably it just ends up being assumed. If you write Feb 15th 22:00-03:00 people know that the second time is the the 16th. People working night shifts deal with this problem now and it has never seemed like a big complaint. Things like "want to grab dinner on the 15th" may be a bit more confusing if your day rolls over around dinner time where you are, but I'm sure we would quickly adopt conventions to solve this problem. It would definitely be a big change, but these aren't hugely complex problems. Language and culture would quickly adapt.
So overall I think it is better. It makes it 100% reliable to agree and discuss specific times and it doesn't really change the difficulty of identifying a good time in a particular location. The only real downside is how we communicate about time currently, but I think that would be pretty easy to overcome.
However I don't think it is really worth changing. It would be a huge shift for a relatively little gain. How about we just focus on getting rid of Daylight Savings Time for now, then we can ponder switching to UTC and base 12 counting in the future.
We already have it: it's called UTC. You should read about it probably, instead of asking the whole fucking world to change its uses for your convenience, shouldn't you?
This response was pointlessly aggressive.
My guy, instead of being condescending for no reason, perhaps you should take the time to actually understand OP's question.
OP is asking about why the world doesn't unite under one time zone (UTC+0, UTC-5, UTC+8), not time standard (UTC, TAI, GPST). The hypothetical scenario would be that midnight in the UK would be morning in Japan and evening in the US, but still considered "12 AM" by everyone in those countries, with the hope that it simplifies time coordination across the globe without having to calculate the hour offsets.
I hope you learn to be better, especially in a community called "No Stupid Questions".
I understand the question very well, it was asked a week or two ago.
This doesn't simplify anything for anyone because then time would mean nothing. Because of this people would not use this system anyway.
Then please use that as your answer instead of taking such a needlessly aggressive and rude stance in your comment.
“you’re fucking late to your goddamn shift you lazy piece of shit it’s already 35*()*46 B,shk past 73!!”
Because people don't like change, and this was set up when global communications were not yet a thing.
We are still struggling to get rid of Daylight Savings Time
Kind of the opposite though, this was setup.ehen global communications started to be a thing... Through trains. Timezones were setup for the railway system.