Dump Time Zones

[beero1000]

Let us all — wherever and whenever — live on what the world’s timekeepers call Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. (though “earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary.

Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. (“Midnight” will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it; after all, their winter comes in June.

The human relationship with time changed substantially with the arrival of modernity — trains and telegraphs and wristwatches all around — and we can see it changing yet again in our globally networked era. We should synchronize our watches for real.

I’m not the first to propose this seemingly radical notion. Aviation already uses U.T.C. (called Zulu Time) — fewer collisions that way — and so do many computer folk. The visionary novelist Arthur C. Clarke suggested a single all-earth time zone when he was pondering the future of global communication as far back as 1976.

James Gleick wants the world to switch to UTC.

We can't even get the US to switch to SI so, unlikely. There are pros and cons though...

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Sounds good, but let's use Toronto as the baseline instead of Greenwich. I don't want my own hours getting messed up and the rest of you guys can do it for me instead.

 

[JonA]

Time Zones are useful for setting schedules. Without them, when would lunch be and where would lunch be at those times?

It's also much easier remembering times set on an even schedule, such as television programming running in 1/2 hour increments on the hour and exactly 30 minutes past.

Going without Time Zones seems quite foolish and impractical.

 

[Jayjay]

Getting rid of wondering what time it is in Petropavlosk would not obviate questions like "is it still office hours in Petropavlosk?", which is the relevant information. And removing time zones would make that that actually harder to quickly figure out.

Also, when people move to Mars it's going to be even more inconvenient as the length of the day is different on other planets. If we're going through the trouble we better think far enough ahead so that we don't have to come up with yet another scheme hundred years from now. Maybe a "stardate" that just counts time forward instead of attempting to loop around according to rotations of a specific planet?

 

[Keith&Co.]

Sounds good, but let's use Toronto as the baseline instead of Greenwich. I don't want my own hours getting messed up and the rest of you guys can do it for me instead.

Yeah, every time I see someone suggesting this, I want them to throw a dart at the time-zone map and live by that time for a month. Surely it's just an adjustment, right?

 

[dismal]

Time zones are not hard to manage. Especially as we enter the digital age and devices adjust most everything for you.

What I am more against is daylight savings time. It just seems unnecessarily disruptive.

 

[Terrell]

Time zones are not hard to manage. Especially as we enter the digital age and devices adjust most everything for you.

What I am more against is daylight savings time. It just seems unnecessarily disruptive.

^^This.

Exactly what purpose does daylight savings time serve for people who live in societies with electric lighting?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Getting rid of wondering what time it is in Petropavlosk would not obviate questions like "is it still office hours in Petropavlosk?", which is the relevant information. And removing time zones would make that that actually harder to quickly figure out.

Also, when people move to Mars it's going to be even more inconvenient as the length of the day is different on other planets. If we're going through the trouble we better think far enough ahead so that we don't have to come up with yet another scheme hundred years from now. Maybe a "stardate" that just counts time forward instead of attempting to loop around according to rotations of a specific planet?

Exactly. Time zones or not make no difference to people in a location. The value of time zones is for people who aren't there.

 

[RVonse]

Time zones are not hard to manage. Especially as we enter the digital age and devices adjust most everything for you.

What I am more against is daylight savings time. It just seems unnecessarily disruptive.

^^This.

Exactly what purpose does daylight savings time serve for people who live in societies with electric lighting?

+2 Agree

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Let us all — wherever and whenever — live on what the world’s timekeepers call Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. (though “earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary.

Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. (“Midnight” will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it; after all, their winter comes in June.

The human relationship with time changed substantially with the arrival of modernity — trains and telegraphs and wristwatches all around — and we can see it changing yet again in our globally networked era. We should synchronize our watches for real.

I’m not the first to propose this seemingly radical notion. Aviation already uses U.T.C. (called Zulu Time) — fewer collisions that way — and so do many computer folk. The visionary novelist Arthur C. Clarke suggested a single all-earth time zone when he was pondering the future of global communication as far back as 1976.

James Gleick wants the world to switch to UTC.

We can't even get the US to switch to SI so, unlikely. There are pros and cons though...

99.9% of the human race doesn't need to know what time it is in Greenwich, Britain. In fact, 99.99% of the human race can't even find Greenwich on a map and couldn't care less where it actually is. We adjust clocks to local time to keep our daly planning and activities synched to the local sidereal day, which means we need to know approximately what time the sun will rise and what time the sun will set and what time one day ends and the next day begins.

OTOH, there's nothing particularly special about greenwich that we should be setting all our clocks by it. We might as well set all our clocks to Honolulu mean time for all the difference it'll make.

 

[bilby]

Time zones are not hard to manage. Especially as we enter the digital age and devices adjust most everything for you.

What I am more against is daylight savings time. It just seems unnecessarily disruptive.

^^This.

Exactly what purpose does daylight savings time serve for people who live in societies with electric lighting?

It's not for the people who live in societies with electric lighting. Daylight savings serves the same purpose it always did - to increase the productivity of the Kaiser's munitions factories.

 

[beero1000]

Sounds good, but let's use Toronto as the baseline instead of Greenwich. I don't want my own hours getting messed up and the rest of you guys can do it for me instead.

Sounds fair.

Time Zones are useful for setting schedules. Without them, when would lunch be and where would lunch be at those times?

It's also much easier remembering times set on an even schedule, such as television programming running in 1/2 hour increments on the hour and exactly 30 minutes past.

Going without Time Zones seems quite foolish and impractical.

TV programming has to specify time zones now anyway and getting rid of them won't have any effect on increments of hours (at least in the majority of time zones).

Getting rid of wondering what time it is in Petropavlosk would not obviate questions like "is it still office hours in Petropavlosk?", which is the relevant information. And removing time zones would make that that actually harder to quickly figure out.

Also, when people move to Mars it's going to be even more inconvenient as the length of the day is different on other planets. If we're going through the trouble we better think far enough ahead so that we don't have to come up with yet another scheme hundred years from now. Maybe a "stardate" that just counts time forward instead of attempting to loop around according to rotations of a specific planet?

Both calculations require knowing the difference between the two locations. Business hours might be a good example of where UTC might actually be better - business hours in Petropavlosk would be independent of where I am - with time zones I'd have to recalculate every time I switch time zones..

If we can't have a universal time on Earth, an interplanetary universal time might be out of reach.

James Gleick wants the world to switch to UTC.

We can't even get the US to switch to SI so, unlikely. There are pros and cons though...

99.9% of the human race doesn't need to know what time it is in Greenwich, Britain. In fact, 99.99% of the human race can't even find Greenwich on a map and couldn't care less where it actually is. We adjust clocks to local time to keep our daly planning and activities synched to the local sidereal day, which means we need to know approximately what time the sun will rise and what time the sun will set and what time one day ends and the next day begins.

OTOH, there's nothing particularly special about greenwich that we should be setting all our clocks by it. We might as well set all our clocks to Honolulu mean time for all the difference it'll make.

That misses the point entirely.

 

[Jayjay]

Getting rid of wondering what time it is in Petropavlosk would not obviate questions like "is it still office hours in Petropavlosk?", which is the relevant information. And removing time zones would make that that actually harder to quickly figure out.

Both calculations require knowing the difference between the two locations. Business hours might be a good example of where UTC might actually be better - business hours in Petropavlosk would be independent of where I am - with time zones I'd have to recalculate every time I switch time zones..

Except business hours are just one thing. I might want to know when it's too late to call my friend there. Or when they wake up. And I might need this info randomly for dozen different places so it might not make sense to memorize everything, nor try to count these times relative to whatever fixed point in the day I may remember. It's much easier to just google "time in Petropavlosk" to get a good idea what they are up to.

 

[bilby]

Both calculations require knowing the difference between the two locations. Business hours might be a good example of where UTC might actually be better - business hours in Petropavlosk would be independent of where I am - with time zones I'd have to recalculate every time I switch time zones..

Except business hours are just one thing. I might want to know when it's too late to call my friend there. Or when they wake up. And I might need this info randomly for dozen different places so it might not make sense to memorize everything, nor try to count these times relative to whatever fixed point in the day I may remember. It's much easier to just google "time in Petropavlosk" to get a good idea what they are up to.

There are only 180,000 people in Petropavlovsk. I just don't see this being a big enough problem to be worth worrying about.

 

[Jayjay]

Except business hours are just one thing. I might want to know when it's too late to call my friend there. Or when they wake up. And I might need this info randomly for dozen different places so it might not make sense to memorize everything, nor try to count these times relative to whatever fixed point in the day I may remember. It's much easier to just google "time in Petropavlosk" to get a good idea what they are up to.

There are only 180,000 people in Petropavlovsk. I just don't see this being a big enough problem to be worth worrying about.

The folks in Petropavlosk know what time it is there already. There are seven billion people outside Petropavlosk who don't.

 

[Jayjay]

Except business hours are just one thing. I might want to know when it's too late to call my friend there. Or when they wake up. And I might need this info randomly for dozen different places so it might not make sense to memorize everything, nor try to count these times relative to whatever fixed point in the day I may remember. It's much easier to just google "time in Petropavlosk" to get a good idea what they are up to.

There are only 180,000 people in Petropavlovsk. I just don't see this being a big enough problem to be worth worrying about.

The folks in Petropavlosk know what time it is there already. There are seven billion people outside Petropavlosk who don't.