https://qntm.org/abolish

Things Of Interest Time

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones

2015-01-16 by qntm

Laudable!

Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this,
through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a
relative.

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's 4:25am there, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in
New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.

Well, hold on a second. First of all, we need to straighten out some
terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post
meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the
position of the Sun, not of the clock. With time zones, these were
roughly the same, but now the position of the clock is objective
whereas the position of the Sun is subjective. In much of the world,
they do not agree in the slightest. 12:00 is nowhere near the middle
of the solar day, if it's even during the solar day. Likewise, 00:00
is nowhere near the middle of the solar night. Worse, in many places
there is still a "7pm" (i.e. 7 in the afternoon), but it's at 07:00.
Similarly, "7 in the morning" is at 19:00... but is followed by "8 in
the afternoon", because the Sun passes its zenith at 19:30.

So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun
is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant
when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero
hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's
the only way to be unambiguous.

So to rephrase: 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.

*

...Well, put it this way. I'm in the UK. He's in Australia. How far
ahead of me is he?

He isn't. Not at all. Uncle Steve is zero hours ahead. Melbourne,
Australia is on the same time zone, the same week day and the same
calendar date as me, and the rest of the world. We have blissful
disambiguation. We have eliminated time zones, daylight saving and
the international date line.

I still don't know if I can call my uncle, though!

*

Alright, there must be a way to work this out. We can find out what
hours Uncle Steve's office operates, add a few hours beforehand for
breakfast, and a few more hours after that for evening activities.
Then we can see whether 04:25 falls in that range.

Well, those ranges. I'm in the UK, and a typical "nine to five"
office (hah, bit of an anachronism there) now operates multiple
ranges of times each day:

Monday    17:00 to 24:00
Tuesday   00:00 to 01:00, 17:00 to 24:00
Wednesday 00:00 to 01:00, 17:00 to 24:00
Thursday  00:00 to 01:00, 17:00 to 24:00
Friday    00:00 to 01:00, 17:00 to 24:00
Saturday  00:00 to 01:00
Sunday    closed

Although, some people go home early on Saturday evening, because
that's the start of the weekend. "Saturday evening" means around
01:00 in the UK at this time of year. (It can vary seasonally.) Some
people even go home as early as 23:00, which is Friday evening. The
second Friday evening, that is. There are two Friday evenings now. In
this country, anyway.

In any case, you can see very easily (?) that if it's currently
04:25, then my office closed a few hours ago.

It's actually Saturday today, so in fact my office is closed for the
weekend.

*

But there's another dangerous word: "today". You can't say "it's
Saturday today" anymore. It's more correct to say that "it's Saturday
right now". The term "today" usually means "the current solar day"
but "Saturday" is no longer a "day" in that sense - it no longer
corresponds unambiguously to a single solar day.

Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's
Friday/Saturday today". And in fact, business hours here in the UK
are typically documented in this much simpler form:

Monday/Tuesday     17:00 to 01:00
Tuesday/Wednesday  17:00 to 01:00
Wednesday/Thursday 17:00 to 01:00
Thursday/Friday    17:00 to 01:00
Friday/Saturday    17:00 to 01:00
Saturday/Sunday    closed
Sunday/Monday      closed

As you can see, a "weekday" is Monday/Tuesday to Friday/Saturday.
Again, this is not the case all over the world: some countries work
on Sunday/Monday to Thursday/Friday. This means that it is not
possibly to say universally whether Friday/Saturday is a "weekday".
And other countries still are well-enough aligned with Standard Time
that they get to retain conventional weekly timetables, which run
from "Monday" to "Sunday". Lucky them!

(When does Monday/Tuesday roll over to Tuesday/Wednesday? Who knows?)

Interesting aside: Due to religious stipulations, some people take
the second half of Friday/Saturday off, or the first half of Sunday/
Monday. Some people, obeying other religious stipulations, now
consider the Sabbath to be the entire solar day of Saturday/Sunday
and its preceding solar night. It sort of varies. This is to say
nothing of the religious stipulations which alter the meanings of the
usual day names to refer to nonstandard periods of time - i.e., whole
local solar days. It was all quite contentious for a while there.

Sunday trading laws look a bit weird now, too.

But anyway: we can find out Uncle Steve's working timetable and work
forwards from that. Except that Uncle Steve's organisation doesn't
have fixed working hours. Or maybe it does, but it doesn't publish
them online. Or maybe I'm such a bad nephew that I don't even
remember where Uncle Steve works. Wait, now I remember why I don't
remember: he's retired.

Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically.

Hmm.

*

Okay, it looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. Is the
Sun up in Melbourne?

Let me find a webcam somewhere in that city.

...Looks like it's daylight, but I can't see the Sun itself from this
angle, and even if I could I don't know if I could tell whether it
was rising or setting. But if it's daylight, doesn't that mean Uncle
Steve will be awake?

Well, not necessarily. Where I am, in the UK, the Sun set hours ago.
But it's northern hemisphere winter here, and the days are short.
Just because the Sun is down doesn't imply that I'm asleep, and
conversely just because the Sun is up in the southern hemisphere
summer doesn't mean Uncle Steve will be awake.

I guess I can conclude that the Sun is rising there. That means it's
the morning, so he's likely either awake or soon to wake up. But what
time in the morning is it? (04:25! We've been over this!) But how
many hours ahead is he? (Zero!)

*

Erm... Let's assume a typical human being is awake for approximately
16 hours per day - 14 for safety - and that this period of time is
centred on local solar noon for convenience purposes. What time is
solar noon in Melbourne today? I'll take that time, subtract half a
day (7 hours) and assume that that's the time Uncle Steve typically
gets up in the morning.

So, we know that solar noon along our new prime meridian is 12:00 by
definition, or at least kept within one second of it through the
periodic introduction of leap seconds. And the prime meridian, as we
all know from history, is now at 120deg east, running slightly east of
Beijing, China.

Oh, where did you think it was going to be? Somewhere convenient for
you?

One of the stronger reasons for adopting a new time zone is to more
easily do business with a neighbouring territory which already uses
that time zone. China, a gigantic country spanning some sixty degrees
of longitude (and therefore, nominally, four whole "hours") has been
unified on a single time zone since 1949. And it was already the
largest single time zone in the world by population.

So, this phenomenon has now spread globally. Everybody wants to do
business with China and her allies - everybody is China's ally.
Everybody is on China Standard Time, UTC+08:00.

So the prime meridian is at 120deg east. Meanwhile, according to
Wikipedia, Melbourne is at longitude 144deg 57' 47" east. That puts
Melbourne 24deg 57' 47" further east than the prime meridan. Assuming
the solar day is precisely 24 hours, and my arithmetic is correct,
that means Melbourne experiences solar noon 1 hour 39 minutes 51
seconds earlier than the prime meridian, at 10:20:09. So, Uncle
Steve's diurnal routine probably involves getting up around 03:20 and
going to sleep around 17:20. (Dang, I bet the Australians still get
to use regular days like "Thursday". I'm envious.)

It's 04:25 now - he's definitely up. I'm calling him.

It's ringing.

It's been ringing for a while...

*

"Who is this?"

"Hello Uncle Steve!"

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" Uncle Steve asks, sounding as
if he is still asleep.

"Of course I do, and so do you! It's 04:25 on Saturday... everywhere
." I add a dramatic emphasis to the last word.

"But do you know what 04:25 on Saturday signifies in Melbourne?"

"Breakfast time?"

I can actually hear him rubbing his eyes.

"We don't centre our waking/sleeping cycle on solar noon, fool
nephew," Uncle Steve explains. "We centre the school day on solar
noon. In countries above and below certain latitudes, where seasonal
variation in the amount of daylight is significant, it's important
for there to be the maximum amount of light when children are going
to school in the morning, and coming home from school in the
afternoon. Here in Melbourne, solar noon is about 10:30 Standard
Time, so the average school day is timetabled from 07:00 to 14:00,
and a typical working day runs from about 07:00 to 15:00. That means
that on a working day, I get up at 05:00, at the earliest."

"Ooogh. Sorry. That's about two hours later than I reckoned," I tell
him.

"I know," he replies.

"I didn't know you did that in Australia," I say. "That deliberate
misalignment of the diurnal routine. Does every country do it?"

"No. Equatorial countries don't, because they get plenty of light all
year round. Temperate countries do, though. The technical term for it
is 'daylight saving'."

I blink.

"And 05:00 is when I get up on a working day," Uncle Steve continues.
"On Saturdays, I like to lie in. Until solar noon, if possible.
That's more than five hours from now."

I'm beaten. "I guess I have no idea what 04:25 on Saturday signifies.
It used to be pretty universal, but now where I live it signifies a
time to go out and get drunk..."

"And where I live," Uncle Steve says, "it signifies a hangover."

"The same time of day on the same day of the week means many
different things to different people all over the world," I say. "Too
many to remember them all."

"Yeah," Uncle Steve grumbles. "It would be neat if there was a lookup
table for that kind of thing."

In summary

Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

  * 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.

As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time
is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only
exacerbates this problem.

Other objections not mentioned above:

  * We already do have a global standard time zone, and everybody who
    cares already uses it: UTC. There are also more accurate time
    standards in use for more specialist purposes.

  * There already exists an extremely well-maintained, public
    database of every time zone in every world territory going back
    to 1970 and some distance beyond, called zoneinfo. Zoneinfo can
    be used to answer questions such as "If a person says they live
    in Angola, how should their computer's clock be set?", "If it's
    20:35 in Djibouti, what time is it in St. Kitts and Nevis, and
    for that matter is it the same calendar day there?" and "When
    does the U.S. observe daylight saving?"

  * Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively
    scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who
    lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of
    past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will
    remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the
    zoneinfo database can never be abandoned.

  * In fact, altering the global distribution of time zones yet again
    - even to scrap them - only serves to make the zoneinfo database
    larger and makes the past more complicated. Now you need to
    record when every territory switched over to the new global
    Standard Time. What if they don't all make the switch
    simultaneously, but at a convenient local time in the middle of
    the local night?

  * No matter what the law says, people will continue "unofficially"
    using their own local time for most purposes, maintaining two
    clocks in parallel if need be. This already happens in western
    China, and can only increase ambiguity. (I guess you'd call that
    "civil time disobedience"?)

*

If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen,
since it relies on an international agreement between every single
nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire
world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian
regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.

Back to Time
Back to Things Of Interest

Discussion (50)

2015-01-17 00:10:28 by Camllorn:

So, I'm curious, though this maybe off topic. Assuming we reached
space, how do you think we solve the time problem? I can't think of
anything that doesn't multiply the above insanity by 10. Time zones
are great-if you have one planet. But now you've also got varying day
lengths, years, etc. I'm curious if you've given any thought to this;
my immediate thought is that we all use a standard frame of
reference, but that'd necessitate going against the light cycle in
order for it to actually be sane. Which is probably a problem,
biologically. Maybe we'll all end up on software to manage figuring
it out for us, or something. But I've never been able to find a good
solution, and it seems like kind of a certainty that we'll reach
space at this point.

2015-01-17 00:23:40 by DanielLC:

The whole thing about trying to find the time in another city is just
a semantics thing. It will stop being difficult to say when people
start having a need to say it. If I want to talk about how much $1000
was worth twenty years ago, does wolfram alpha just tell me it was
worth $1000? Of course not. It says it was $1579.62: http://
www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241000+%281995+money%29 The same sort
of thing applies here. If you want to know what time it is in
Melbourne, they'll tell you what time that time of day corresponds to
your present time. Asking how many hours off they are will still be a
perfectly valid question. It's just that the answer won't be an
integer number of hours. Midday and midnight won't mean the middle of
the day and the middle of the night, but unless you go to bed at 8:00
pm and wake up at 4:00 am, they already don't. The only problem is
the changing of the day. But that's already confusing. Is the
appropriate greeting at 1:00 am "good night" or "good morning"? 12:00
am almost always refers to midnight, and almost always the one at the
beginning of the day, but it's still confusing enough that it's
common for things to happen at 11:59 pm.

2015-01-17 00:24:38 by Bauglir:

I've got it! What if we instituted time zones in 1-second intervals
instead of 1-hour, thereby ensuring that people allegedly in the same
time zone don't experience days that are nearly a whole hour out of
sync? The logical conclusion is continuous time but that's probably
technologically and/or physically impractical, and 1 second is
probably a good enough approximation for everyday use. This will
surely have exactly zero drawbacks.

2015-01-17 00:29:17 by qntm:

I have a mental image of the person who successfully eradicated time
zones, but somehow failed to eradicate daylight saving, falling to
their knees screaming NOOOOOOOOOO

2015-01-17 00:41:44 by qntm:

Bauglir that was called "Railway Time", and the problems it caused
are why we have large "time zones" in the first place - zones where
all the clocks are synchronised regardless of the position of the
Sun.

2015-01-17 01:09:13 by Bauglir:

Listen, the important thing about mistakes is not that we avoid
making them, it's that we avoid learning from them. Sadly your wise
formatting policies prevent me from making this sentence transparent,
but I'm not being even slightly serious.

2015-01-17 01:11:22 by Bauglir:

Surprising to learn that anybody ever thought that was a good idea,
though.

2015-01-17 01:47:35 by Ben:

This essay does a great job of showing why the abolition of time
zones is a bad idea, but is there actually anyone who needed
convincing of that?

2015-01-17 02:27:25 by qntm:

Yes, pretty much everybody who has experience with time zones
entertains the idea of abolishing them now and then. I see it come up
in many discussions of date/time software problems. The sad fact is
that modern timekeeping, while horrendous on a technical level, is
about as good as it gets.

2015-01-17 02:42:36 by Joel:

Interesting that you bring up China since that country has only one
time zone. Russia has 9. Both systems seem to work.

2015-01-17 02:50:13 by Matt:

It saddens me to say this but I am guilty of wishing the world was on
one time zone. Planning cross time zone meetings can be such a pain.
Not nearly as painfully as planning them without though.

2015-01-17 03:19:58 by Madge:

Well, I have to say, that given I live in Perth, Western Australia
and so I am fortunate enough to share the GMT+8 time zone, I'm all
for this new system. ;)

2015-01-17 04:54:22 by Quintopia :

You missed the obvious first step central to any plan to abolish time
zones : 1) Upload the entire population to a digital earth with a
worldwide Minecraft-style day/night cycle. Surely this is what all
the proponents of time zone abolition intend.

2015-01-17 05:03:30 by green:

That a change is difficult or requires adaptation does not indicate
that it is not an improvement. But I never asked for time zones to be
abolished, only daylight saving time. Spontaneously adding/removing
hours is absurd. At least we have UTC.

2015-01-17 06:02:48 by ross:

Bauglir: People thought Railway Time was a good idea when rail
transit was the fastest way to get anywhere. And when telegraphs were
the fastest way to communicate -- nearly instant in transmission,
true, but with long latency from the time sender begins writing to
the time receiver begins reading. Synchronized time DIDN'T MATTER
back then. You couldn't get to another place fast enough to
experience "jet lag" (because there were no jets), so why care? [I
thought the sqrt(-1) test accepted j as an answer?)

2015-01-17 06:40:31 by Tanzanian:

Also note that in some equatorial countries the sun rises and sets
pretty much exactly at what we would call 6a.m. and 6p.m. Thus it's
often convenient to count not from midnight, but instead count 12
daylight and 12 night hours. E.g. school starts at 1 in the day,
meaning get up at 11 at night, have breakfast at sunrise, then hop on
the bus. Not really about time zones per se, but it underscores the
point that talking about time should be above all convenient for
humans in everyday situations.

2015-01-17 06:57:16 by Tab Atkins:

The entire argument of the post, though, applies exactly as well to
dates. We all use exactly the same calendar, all around the world,
and agree on the date at all times, similar to what we'd experience
if we were all on China Time. But that means I can't tell what the
weather is like if I want to go visit Uncle Steve! I mean, January is
pretty cold here, but when I google for the date in Melbourne, it
just says it's January over there too! You can't even say that
Melbourne is "6 months ahead", because it's still January there,
that's not right. We've somehow developed language around the lack of
"date zones", and can reasonably talk about Melbourne being in summer
in January while we're in winter in January. We can talk about places
closer to the equator having longer summers and shorter winters than
places closer to the poles, despite them having the same dates. And
the benefit of all this is that we can schedule events really easily,
with a single date meaning the same thing to everyone around the
world (except for the complication of time zones...), while
simultaneously having a decent grasp on what the weather is like by
describing the date over there by its "season name". We could do the
same with time. Use a single numeric global time, just like the
single numeric global date, and use time words to refer to segments
of the day according to our schedule - morning, afternoon, etc - just
as we use season words to describe segments of the year according to
the weather. It's totally reasonable, in such a world, for Google to
answer your "what time is it in Melbourne" query with "early
morning", letting you know it's probably good to wait a bit before
calling. The day naming issue is the only really annoying bit. We're
okay with naming a year by a span of 365 days from a certain date,
rather than from a certain season (so the southern hemisphere year
doesn't start in July), but we're attached, with good reason, to
thinking of days according to our schedule, rather than as a span of
24 hours from an arbitrary point. But I'm sure we could figure out
something for it.

2015-01-17 08:39:39 by Ellie Kesselman:

Tab Atkins, did you skip reading the article and go straight to the
comments? I thought we decided time zones are a good thing. I know
that I'm convinced!

2015-01-17 09:32:23 by Jeff:

Two comments... #1: Don't assume folks actually check the time before
calling. If its important I suspect they'll call anyway... #2: Who
still calls people??? With text messages, tweets, email, Facebook,
pokes, etc. It doesn't really matter when communication is sent.

2015-01-17 12:14:05 by naebd:

Brilliant. And it's simply amazing to me that there exist people who
think abolishing timezones would be a good idea. Proof if any were
needed that being "smart" has only a loose correlation with talking
sense!

2015-01-17 12:29:37 by Rocky:

Camllorn: We already do this. The Curiosity team operates on a Mars
day (they call it a Sol), which is of course about forty minutes
longer than an Earth day. So their work hours slip by forty minutes a
day and slowly go out of alignment with local days. (Sauce: http://
www.space.com/16975-curiosity-mars-rover-mission-control.html) I
guess what I'm saying is that we'll always find a way to make it
work. In fact, we already have. For a given value of work.

2015-01-17 13:04:46 by Tom:

As a software developer and international meeting organiser, I hate
time zones. I built http://fuck.timezon.es to work around the
problem, but still I dreamt of a day when time zones would be
abolished; how naive I was. I understand now - planetary rotation (on
a tilted axis), elliptical orbits and their resultant cycles of
light, dark and seasons mean life without time zones is more awkward
even than life with them. I'll endure them for now, but at the first
opportunity I'm leaving Earth to live in a Dyson Sphere. And in that
Dyson Sphere we'll use a single currency, unicode and the metric
system :P

2015-01-17 23:23:55 by trainbrain27:

The ISS uses UTC+0 which is a nice clean time, midway between USA and
Russia, and would be especially convenient for Europeans. NASA used
to use EST, and recently was using Central time (for Houston).

2015-01-17 23:49:03 by MichaelSzegedy:

I think abolishing time zones would be simpler than you describe. You
could look up/memorize an offset to see what level of daylight there
corresponds to what level of daylight here. Uncle lives in Melbourne?
"Hmm, my offset's +0, his offset's +10, so when it's 4 here, it's as
though it's 14 there. I wouldn't be awake at 14 here, so it's best
not to call him." The question "What time is it where you are?"
becomes useless/meaningless because you already know the time;
instead, it's replaced with the question "What offset is it where you
are?", the answer to which is constant for a particular location and
is therefore simpler. That said, I wouldn't like to abolish time
zones, as I do a lot of traveling, and not having to get used to
different time schemes is convenient. If/when we start living on
multiple planets, it won't get much harder, except that you need to
remember how many hours in a day there are on each planet. The
question "what time is it there" will get harder to answer, because
not only would Mars have time zones, but the offset between those
time zones and Earth time zones would change constantly. However,
that should be nearly a non-issue at that point, with the advent of
computers.

2015-01-18 00:35:40 by TroyHurts:

MichaelSzegedy, I think the system you described, with the system of
integer offsets for different regions, has already been proposed and
attempted. They're called "time zones" if memory serves, and it has
the added bonus of being able to use the same numbers to refer to
roughly the same part of the diurnal cycle in different regions!

2015-01-18 01:00:34 by MichaelSzegedy:

Very funny, TroyHurts. The system I described would be qualitatively
different from current time zones. People would use different numbers
to think about time than currently. You'd wake up in the morning in
Indonesia, and it'd be 20 o'clock. The offsets are only relevant when
you care about how daily life differs from region to region;
otherwise, it's universal time, which is desirable because it
simplifies life for transportation agencies and programmers. Sam's
issues only occurred because there was no central source that told
the time differences between when morning etc. occurred between
different regions.

2015-01-18 01:11:45 by g:

After abolishing time zones, take 2: I want to call my Uncle Steve in
Melbourne. What part of the day are they in? Google tells me it's
"just after sunrise on Saturday" there. Probably best not to call him
right now. The end. At present, Google understands queries about
local time because they are common and useful. In a world without
time zones there would no longer be queries about local time, but
some terminology would evolve for describing local variations in
when-in-the-day-it-is and Google would understand queries about that.
For exactly the same reason as, in the present with-time-zones world,
it understand queries like "time in melbourne". The terminology might
end up being awfully similar to the notation we now use for local
times, as MichaelSzegedy suggests, and we might then end up using
exactly as we now use local times, as Sam suggests, in which case
indeed we'd be back where we started. But I don't think it's obvious
that that would happen. (Would it be "just after sunrise"? Quite
possibly not. It might be "two hours before the start of a typical
working day" or something. Exactly what Google would find it
appropriate to say would depend on what conventions we developed
after the abolition of time zones, which I don't feel comfortable
predicting with any confidence.)

2015-01-18 04:24:42 by Ellie:

The issue of knowing where the sun is for your friends around the
world is a problem I've been dealing with for a few years now. Since
they all travel, seemingly work odd hours, and generally don't have
the concept of a sleep scheduled, I've had trouble keeping track of
when it's appropriate to call or not. Of course, the simplest
solution is just send a text and have them get back to me whenever,
but that's not a solution which is really worth typing out a few
paragraphs to explain. Especially when pretty much everyone can think
of it for themselves. The way I try and manage it all was by
replacing my desktop wallpaper with a map of the Earth with the light
of the sun projected on it. At a glance, I can see where noon,
morning, night, evening, and all the little solar time keeping names
for anywhere in the world provided I know enough geography to
approximate city locations. While it works for me, putting such a
projection along side your usual clocks probably isn't the best
'solution' to the 'solution'. Just a quick shorthand that works for
phone etiquette about as well as asking for the time in Lolipoluza
Land on Google. Which really only means that the coders get out of
this for the better (at least for the adjustment period). Time zones
are a nightmare to keep track of if you're writing your own program,
but that's only for enthusiasts and those who don't know the rule of
checking to see if someone else has already solved your problem
first. It would interesting if nothing else to see a world where
people don't talk with time-notation and just looked to a map of the
whole Earth every time they wanted to make a call.

2015-01-18 05:35:45 by Andrew:

@Camllorn: Most likely, we would use calendars and time zones
synchronized to the local day on planets, "ship's time" aboard ships,
and TAI for any kind of important business of potentially
interplanetary significance. Bodies without reasonably human-scale
day/night cycles would have to get more creative, but the point, I
think, is that everyone would use some kind of "local time" except
when dealing with people far away. Like now, only moreso.

2015-01-18 05:35:59 by Toph:

Ellie, have you ever seen xkcd.com/now?

2015-01-18 10:36:50 by Val:

This article is a good example for the absurdity how a lot of
armchair self-appointed "savers of the world" think, who suddenly
come up with "great ideas" how to reform society to eliminate
poverty, racism, wars, or other negative things like time zones, and
have absolutely no clue that their great ideas, while maybe looking
great in an inspirational cartoon or blog post, would horribly fail
in real life.

2015-01-18 13:57:11 by P:

In some airports they have a world map showing where is in darkness
and where has daylight. Although calling someone in the Arctic circle
in June (we're still allowed months right?) when it happens to be
daylight is no real guarantee.

2015-01-18 19:54:09 by MichaelSzegedp:

@Val: I am suddenly curious as to why you mentioned an inspirational
cartoon. Got any examples?

2015-01-18 21:55:49 by Solus:

What are you talking about, Uncle Steve? Of course there's a lookup
table.

2015-01-19 00:23:45 by Tab Atkins:

@Ellie Kesselman: Of course I read the article. My comment
specifically called out several parts of Sam's article, used parallel
naming and structure, answered specific problems from the post, etc.
I, like the later post by g, was pointing out that the problems Sam
brings up agent as fatal as he makes them out to be. We solve the
same problem with dates already, and it's easy to see how to apply
the solutions from dates to answer some of the main problems that Sam
brought up. The only string remaining issue is day naming, as I said.

2015-01-19 01:57:19 by billy:

I don't mind time zones. I just don't understand why in the world
there are places that will use "daylight saving time". Adjusting
everyone's clocks is stupid. In Hong Kong here, we just got schools
hours start earlier in Summer and latter in Winter. No need to adjust
clocks.

2015-01-19 04:18:48 by Boter:

Sometimes you remind me of Tom Scott, especially when you cover
similar topics, though in this case from very different angles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

2015-01-19 06:12:05 by Bauglir:

Wait, hang on. With respect to the long-dead talk of Railway Time, I
think maybe we were talking about different things. I was proposing a
system that would have you adjusting your watch by 1 second every
1000 feet or so at the equator. That's a small enough distance,
especially scaled down as you approach the poles, that it would
easily have been an issue even when rails were the primary mode of
long-distance travel. Instead of 24 time zones, you'd have 86400.
Railway Time looks like exactly the opposite of that. I'm starting to
think I'm bad at jokes.

2015-01-19 16:05:05 by Aegeus:

@Tab Atkins: The "problem" you point out with dates isn't a problem
that would be better solved by dividing the earth into "date zones,"
for the simple reason that weather and the date are only loosely
correlated and are tied up with a billion other variables. For
instance, take Cincinnati and Cleveland. They're in the same state,
it would seem natural to put them in the same date zone, and yet
thanks to the "lake effect", a chilly day in Cincinnati could be two
feet of snow in Cleveland! Or take Australia, the go-to example for
"winter there, summer here," and yet average temperatures in
Melbourne in July are well above freezing. Any system of "date zones"
that is fine-grained enough to answer the question of "What's the
weather like where Uncle Steve is?" would be so complex that you'd
basically have to look it up on Google every time. ...Which,
incidentally, is what people already do. Before you go on a trip,
look up the next week's forecast for your destination. More accurate
than guessing based on latitude, and with the added advantage that we
can still all use the same date for measuring time. You know, the
thing it was designed for.

2015-01-19 17:09:54 by Tab Atkins:

@Aegeus Sure, it's definitely not exactly the same and climate is
complicated, but I still think it's a reasonable analogy. We *do*
have season words which we apply differently based on latitude, and
they're useful - saying that Alaska has a "brief summer" and is
"mostly winter" is useful, despite summer/winter technically being
defined by dates. Similarly, Australian summer is American winter,
etc. It just happens that longitude<->time is a more stable/direct
relationship than latitude<->season. ^_^

2015-01-19 21:37:00 by BGK:

I liked Swatch's internet time, where each day has 1000 "beats" (1
beat = 86.4 seconds), it's the same internet time everywhere, and
there is no am or pm. For example: @765. No, it doesn't solve all the
issues, and its not perfect, but people would quickly become used to,
and aware of the "beat times" that they sleep, work, eat, play, and
call people on the other side of the world. Also, there is no reason
why we can't continue use time zones for the concept of the local
"day", but use a single "world time" (be it UTC, Swatch's internet
time, or whatever) for things like international calls and
international travel etc, and even local time reference.

2015-03-06 01:30:06 by Obed Marsh:

@Camllorn <br/>I don't really see the use for a universal time; when
it comes to keeping and comparing time on different planets, it'd
probably be easier (at least when it comes to consistency and
at-a-glance understanding, if nothing else) to just keep local time
with a system for giving enough context to figure the difference. For
example:<br/><br/>Say local time goes from 0 to 100 (0 for when the
sun is as far from azimuth as it can get, 100 for when it's at
azimuth), with prefixes - for when it's going down and + for when
it's going up. So +100 would be immediately before the solar noon at
your position and -100 would be immediately after. After that, you
could place your line of longitude so people can figure what your
time is relative to their's - again, with a + or -, except this time
+ for east and - for west. So if you wanted to find out what time it
was in Greenwich relative to +53 -41 (So around the area of New york
if the International Date Line was 100 and not 180), you can pretty
easily figure that it'd be +94 0. If it also happened to be +53 at
-41 on the moon, and your friend was at the moon's prime meridian,
it'd be +94 there, too. 10 east from the prime meridian, it'd be -96.
If you were aboard a spacecraft or artificial satellite, the time
would probably be calculated by whatever longitude and rotation
period the intended occupants were comfortable with.<br/><br/>Doesn't
really help with the fact that planets rotate at different rates, but
eh - you'd need to memorize rotation periods and what time it was
last time you checked at what longitude and how long it's been since
you last checked. You could probably just look up the times on the
InterPlaNet anyways.

2015-03-08 23:10:10 by Ariel:

I agree with Tom's post from earlier this year. Refreshing that
someone out there shares my opinion.

2015-03-11 00:13:29 by uanit:

google current day night world map. problem solved.

2015-07-09 20:22:12 by qntm:

Another argument against abolishing time zones: Santa Claus would
have to visit every house on Earth simultaneously, many during broad
daylight.

2015-07-09 20:23:14 by qntm:

"I sometimes go to bed as late as 7pm! ...That, uh, that's very late
in this country. It's the equivalent of 2pm where you live. I think.
Just trust me, I'm hardcore."

2015-07-23 18:07:13 by Magnus:

As a former night-shift worker, I think it's rude to assume someone
must be awake just because the sun is shining at their longitude --
although there's a good chance they are because the phone keeps
ringing off the hook and it's hard enough to sleep when the sun is
out. (Yes, I suppose one could just turn off the ringer and sleep
through any true emergencies.)

2015-10-04 05:02:34 by kit:

@BGK I very much like the idea of Internet Time. That unfortunately
means that we'd need two clocks: one that tracks local solar time and
one that tracks Internet Time. However, it's more practical than
arithmetic with time zones (Russia and China being a prime example of
time conversion hell).

2015-10-04 18:09:27 by kit:

One possible solution is to remove some of the time zones instead of
all of them while continuing to use a 24-hour day. The beneficial
aspect of this is that our timekeeping, sleep schedules, etc. are not
tampered with, and it provides a more general indication of when it's
safe to call. For example, the eastern and western hemispheres could
have 2 time zones each, resulting in 4 global time zones. Supposing
this was adopted by the world, the question of whether it's safe to
call Uncle Steve is simplified because you could literally add 6
hours to your time and get a reasonable approximation of what time it
was. If 6 hours is too much, perhaps dividing into 6 time zones of 4
hours each would be better. Theoretically the entire contiguous 48
states of the USA and all of Canada could be on one time zone under
the six-zone scheme, but that would imply that South America would
require two zones. Perhaps a mapping scheme would work where the
western and eastern hemispheres would be separated into 12-hour zones
and further subdivided into 6 sub-zones that are made up of 2 hours
each (instead of 12 sub-zones made up of 1 hour each). Times would be
specified using the following scheme: 2W0500 would represent 5am in
the 3rd Western sub-zone (e.g. New York, UTC-5). The corresponding
time in London (UTC) would be 0E1100, 11am in the 1st Eastern
sub-zone. The math is done as follows: 05 + 2((2 + 0) + 1) = 05 + 6 =
11. Likewise, to handle 0900 in Tokyo to San Francisco, it would be
4E0900 to a time in 4W: 09 - 2((4 + 4) + 1) = 09 - 18 = 24-09 = 15,
so 4W1500 is the answer. If you got the zone wrong, you'd be off by
~2 hours, which is a lot better than being off by 4 zones. Somebody
please think of the farmers? Well, they get up with the sun
typically, so the time issue doesn't matter as much as it does to
someone who needs to be at work at 8am. However, they make a living
selling food to people, so market times are relevant. If the market
is open from 8am to 4pm across another time zone, that means it would
be 6am (or 10am) to 2pm (or 6pm) where the farmer resides, which
results in the need to leave even earlier for the market (or leave
the market "late" by the farmer's usual standards). Of course, if we
didn't have time zones, this wouldn't be an issue. So the real
problem seems to be that time zones make planning work-related events
hell, but they are convenient for personal reasons. With that in
mind, is there a solution?

2015-10-05 01:46:09 by Strichcoder:

Much more important: Adopt time-intervals to the decimal system.

This discussion is closed.

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