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Comment by _urga | Hacker News Reader

In the future, the world will use UTC and sunrise and sunset will happen at different times, relative to where you are.

No they won't. The idea that 12am is night and 12pm is day is pretty well entrenched in society.

While I understand your point, I find that a surprising number of people have issues with 12am vs. 12pm, often confusing the two. These same people tend to think midnight occurs at the end of the day.

Everybody who isn't American or British has issues with am/pm. It is so counter intuitive it is not even funny.

jorangreef is probably right, at least assuming that we get to colonise other worlds. I mean, what does it mean to talk about 'day' when you're on the ISS? How are Martians going to deal with the fact that they have a Sidereal Rotation Period of 24h37mins? Or the Moon, with it's roughly 700hr SRP.

Right on. But maybe a better time would be TAI - UTC without the leap adjustments.

Edit: We basically just need a logical clock though we may face problems reconciling this logical clock in a distributed space/time system.

Did you mean 0:00 is night and 12:00 is day?

This seems like it would cause more problems than it solves.

"It's 10:00 here in London. I need to call someone in New York, what time is it there?" "10:00, same as it is everywhere in the world." "So... is now a good time to call them?" "I have no idea."

I'd imagine it would be much easier to remember "business hours in NYC are between 1200 and 2030 UTC," than remembering the time difference and applying a translation every time.

And live shows would only need to advertise events in UTC. DST is almost a symptom of day/night/time discrepancy already but it's a top-down rather than bottom-up approach.

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