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What if the whole planet ran on a single clock? [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-07-24  

Every so often someone proposes to abolish time zones entirely and put the whole planet on a single clock. It would be the same time everywhere at once: when it reads 08:00 in London, it reads 08:00 in New York and Beijing too — even though New York's sky would look the way it usually does at 3 a.m., and China's like late afternoon.

It sounds radical, but much of the world already runs this way. Airlines, militaries, the International Space Station, and agencies like NOAA all coordinate on one global clock, UTC, because doing arithmetic between zones is exactly the mistake you don't want in aviation or a spacewalk. Arthur C. Clarke floated the one-clock idea in 1976, and a Johns Hopkins economist and astrophysicist have built it into a calendar-reform proposal.

The catch is that you don't escape the problem. Regions would still open shops, start school, and eat lunch at whatever UTC hour suited their daylight, so "business hours" might run 13:00 to 21:00 in one place and 22:00 to 06:00 in another. You'd trade a system of offsets for a set of local customs doing the same work — plus the date flipping over mid-afternoon across parts of the Americas and the Pacific.

Previously:

• Scientists explain our dislike of Daylight Savings Time

[END]
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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/07/24/abolition-of-time-zones.html

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