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edblarney

The article is upside down.

"Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. "

It doesn't. Everybody gets to have their own, proper time.

In comparing times, we +/- based on an arbitrary spot, and that's it.

Time zones are a great solution to a problem.

People want their time in local terms.

Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept.

FYI - if you want to use UTC - you're free to do that today.

To those suggesting we should use UTC: walk down the street and look at regular people. 'Other time zones' are irrelevant to them - utterly. There are very few people who need to deal with other time zones.

It might be remotely possible to put an entire nation on one time - i.e. put America on 'Mountain Time' - it might be possible to convince New Yorkers and Californians that they are getting up earlier/later etc.. But even that wouldn't be very useful in the end.

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> FYI - if you want to use UTC - you're free to do that today.

I tried that out of curiosity once. It did not last very long. I generally organize my time into days: "I'll work on this today, on that tomorrow, and the other thing on Thursday", and I am awake when the sun is up. UTC made it so that the date changed in the middle of the afternoon, which made that abstraction unworkable.

I think this might be one of the biggest problems with this. People's days would change...in the middle of the day. It's hard enough to remember what date it is. Imagine if you had to remember two a day.

Precisely. You simply can't use only UTC locally. You need to develop a system of keeping track of local time. And it can't just be a personal system because you need to figure out equivalents for everyone in the same area (when good times for work schedules or for business hours are). So you need to have an official, standardized system of keeping track of local time information. And in the end you have time zones again.

> Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept.

For most of us who don't travel or communicate internationally much, sure. But for government ambassadors, military officers, and business executives? A single agreed-upon "Earth time" (even just between such people) would really help to keep track of how many hours they have until their next international flight or conference call. I could see things like stock markets and Network Operations Centres also requiring all communications be specified relative to "Earth time."

Of course, what I'm talking about here isn't so much a clock to keep track of waking/sleeping hours; it's a way of keeping track of successive twenty-four-hour periods of monotonic time, that continue to tick at the same rate regardless of where you happen to be on Earth. It makes sense, I think—if you are a person with a "globe-trotting" profession—to care more about monotonic time than local time.

A single agreed-upon Earth time already exists. UTC. It's used successfully in many domains, including those you list.

How would that "Earth Time" be different from the already existing UTC? When scheduling meetings with remote colleagues we always communicate the meeting time in UTC.

"You and your colleagues" can pre-arrange to do as you like. An "Earth time", if it existed, would be the result of a standardization effort to introduce a Schelling point, where you can expect other internationally-minded individuals and organizations to default to specifying times in terms of UTC.

With such a standard in place, it would be allowed to assume that when a person you've just met (i.e. not someone you've pre-arranged an idiolect with) says "I've got to meet a colleague at 3PM" that they mean "3PM UTC." If you based your actions on that assumption, and then that assumption turned out to be wrong, that'd be their fault for specifying a time-zone-less time in "globe-trotting company" when they meant anything other than UTC.

In short: an "Earth time" would be a matter of international etiquette, a social more of the cosmopolitan culture.

(The most obvious effect of this change in etiquette would be that, when you went to an international airport, all the times on the departure/arrival signs would be specified in UTC rather than relative to the local timezone the airport exists in. You'd be expected to do math to work out what local time that is, if you cared.)

UTC is 'Earth Time'.

Ambassadors, frequent travellers and military officers would still rather use local time.

And they make up 0.1% of the population. UTC would severely screw up the other 99.9%.

The military will use UTC when necessary, as will computer nerds like us.

FYI - a very long time ago, I was a 'military officer'. We used local time unless it was necessary. UTC is a very counterintuitive concept. You day changes midday. Your times are always messed up.

It's more than just 'noon' and 'sunset' that's baked into your psyche: your psychology is used to what 2pm means, and what 4:30 pm means, and what 9 pm means etc..

Time Zones are not perfect, but they are a decent compromise between global/local time.

They are not that inconvenient at all. All you have to know is which zone you're in.

Jet-lag won't be helped by UTC :)

What kind of military officer? I was mostly picturing the kind that did long-haul submarine excursions and had no sense of local time anyway. :)

I was a Field Engineer.

People in submarines ... they live on 'rotation schedules' and the entire crew might be divided into 3 different 'sleep shifts'.

And as for time - who knows.

They can use UTC, surely they do for many things - that's why UTC exists - for those who need it.

For 99.9% of the real world, we want local time.

FYI - the '12 hour' thing is a little arbitrary. Napoleon, who instituted a vast array of reforms in Europe that are still in place today, including to a great extent the 'metric system' - tried to institute 'metric time' as well, i.e. 10 hour days.

Didn't go so well, the people revolted/laughed away at that one.

Some things are pretty 'backed in' to culture.

Time is one of them.

Granted I will admit one thing: I live in Montreal, and like the French, the use a 24 system. So coffee shop closes at 19:00. Which means '7 pm'. Which is hard to get used to!

I travel a lot and despite coordinating meetings across timezones being a bit of a pain, I'd hate universal time. When travelling, you just set your watch to whatever timezone you're currently in (phones do it automatically), and to plan meetings you use a website. It would be a major pain having to readjust in every time when trying to find a meeting time 'after lunch' - you'd have to remember a reference point for every time zone you're in, and then do a bunch of arithmetic to adjust for 'first thing after coming into the office', 'just before lunch', 'after work', 'after children are in bed' etc which are the real anchor points you hang your mental time model on.

The numbers are already arbitrary. Even within the US, where the east and west are 'only' three hours apart there are many who believe that only their timezone matters.

For conveying when in time something happened or will happen, using UTC properly is good. There is one singular number that can make sense to everyone. For all other things people perform a lookup, either in their mind or in some utility (paper or program) already.

Times for accounting (arbitrary numbers that presently have local offsets) could benefit from having the offset, and the need for specifying /what/ that offset is, removed.

There is no reason we //need// 9am to mean 'morning', we can use morning for that. Any 'time' that isn't a hard number is a loose social reference for local meanings.

>...there are many who believe that only their timezone matters.

This is partly why we (all) can't have nice things.

Time zones are an arbitrary construct anyhow - what makes 0800 morning and 1900 evening other than our understanding of that time means. They are all entirely human constructs. In business - abolishing time zones is a great idea - but in personal life.. maybe not so much - as a linked article pointed out - humans don't normally publish waking hours.

So is time.

All of China (not a latitudinally small country) is on one time zone, and that's Beijing time -- one of its easternmost points.

In the west, they use Beijing time, and things like banks and post offices operate on Beijing time, but most other aspects of life just shift. Ie, it's normal to wake up at 10am, etc.

> It might be remotely possible to put an entire nation on one time - i.e. put America on 'Mountain Time' - it might be possible to convince New Yorkers and Californians that they are getting up earlier/later etc.. But even that wouldn't be very useful in the end.

China does this, but I think for more or less the same political reasons they falsely claim that everyone in China speaks one identical language and everything else is a "dialect" of it.

China officially does this, but if you travel to some western provinces, you will find that people still secretly keep their own informal local time.

China does this. They span what would be 3 (edit: 4) time zones in the states (I believe), but are only one.

China has one time zone, Beijing time. It could have 5 timezones:

  UTC+5 on its Western border with Afghanistan
  UTC+9 on its Eastern border with Russia (Harbin province)

http://www.worldtimezone.com/

I agree. The article says there'd be some benefits to switching, but there'd also be costs (for example when I travel I don't have to do mental calculations to figure out what time to eat lunch, or when to set my alarm clock).

I think removing daylight savings is a good idea, there's no benefit at all to it, and a lot of costs.

But timezones are handy. Maybe you could simplify them a bit, but to rid of them completely is overkill.

When you travel now you have to either adjust your clocks anyway. If you have software changing the time, you can also have software adjusting your alarms.

The difference is that your expectation of your circadian rhythm never moves. You know when you classically eat and sleep, and unless other appointments require you to disrupt that cycle it is often best to stick with what you know when traveling than disrupt those cycles for whatever span of time you are away from home.

Even if you do not, it is incredibly simple to shift your planning the number of hours according to the shift in sunrise time wherever you are, because you already have to do that with time zones anyway.

It would make for a rather interesting sociological experiment to uncouple the daily book keeping of time from the phases of our planet in relation to the sun.

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