Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth?

usualsuspect191 , 4 months ago

For synchronizing of things like work and school we’d still end up with zones all using the same local hours (the day goes from 4:00 to 4:00 to e.g.) so we’d still end up with timezones there…

All of the clocks around the world would read the same, sure, but now you have no idea what part of the day 4:00 is somewhere else. You’d end up doing almost the same math as we do now by offsetting their time from yours so you could understand it (4:00 is the same as my 13:00 for e.g. so it’s one hour past noon over there) but now we lose the shared understanding of which numbers correspond to which times of day. This means you’d be having to mentally convert all their new times of day to the clock time instead of having intuitive sense of their meaning.

Instead of seeing the local time is 12:00 and immediately knowing it’s noon, now you’d look up what time their day started and see how many hours it’s been since then (12, so it’s noon there) and that offset is how you’d need to think of it and already what clocks show now…

csm10495 , 4 months ago

Doing this would lose a sense of work vs home time for people. I have some coworkers on the other side of the world, I look at their time and know they shouldn’t be online anymore. I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.

It gives me a sense of humanity to know if it’s 8pm their time, it’s way too late for them to be working. I’m sure I could adjust if we all used UTC but it would be so stupid to change.

Also imagine hours for businesses all sounding weird as heck lol.

nickwitha_k , 4 months ago

I tell them things like “Go be with your family” or “Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you”.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing. I also have to scold some junior colleagues about working on their weekends from time to time. Spending all your time working is just a recipe for loneliness and burnout - I know from experience so, try to nudge others away from it.

kevincox , 4 months ago

There are lots of negative opinions in this thread. But I think it is actually a good idea!

It makes time math a lot easier. Of course the switching cost is very high. (And probably not worth it). Much like it would be better if we counted using base 12 it is a better system once the switch would be made.

The main upside is that it is very easy to agree on times. I’ve had job interviews missed because time math was done wrong. They told me my local time and the interviewer their local time but they didn’t match! And it isn’t obvious to either party. When I see “10:00 America/Toronto, 08:00 America/San Francisco” it isn’t really obvious that there was an error here unless you happen to have the offset memorized. With a global time everyone would immediately agree on a time.

One common complaint is that you can no longer use “local time” to estimate if someone is available. But if anything I consider this a feature! Not everyone wakes up at 8 and is at work by 9. Some people prefer to have meetings later, some prefer earlier. Maybe it is best to stop assuming and just asking people. “Hey, what times do you like to take meetings at?” But even if you don’t want to do that it is just as easy to look up “work hours in San Francisco” than it is to look up “current time in San Francisco”. (In fact it may be easier since you don’t need to then do math to find the offset and hope that daylight savings doesn’t change the offset between when you look it up and when the event happens.) On top of that if someone schedules a meeting with you then you immediately know if it works well for you, because you know what times you like to have meetings at. IMHO it is much better to know the time of the meeting reliably than to try to guess if it is a good time for other parties. If the other parties can reliably know what time it is scheduled for they know if it is a good time for them, and can let you know if it isn’t.

I think the real main downside is in how we talk about times and dates. Right now it is very common to say something like Feb 15th, 14:00-19:00. However if the day number changes during the day it can be a bit confusing. But honestly I’m sure we will get used to this quickly. Probably it just ends up being assumed. If you write Feb 15th 22:00-03:00 people know that the second time is the the 16th. People working night shifts deal with this problem now and it has never seemed like a big complaint. Things like “want to grab dinner on the 15th” may be a bit more confusing if your day rolls over around dinner time where you are, but I’m sure we would quickly adopt conventions to solve this problem. It would definitely be a big change, but these aren’t hugely complex problems. Language and culture would quickly adapt.

So overall I think it is better. It makes it 100% reliable to agree and discuss specific times and it doesn’t really change the difficulty of identifying a good time in a particular location. The only real downside is how we communicate about time currently, but I think that would be pretty easy to overcome.

However I don’t think it is really worth changing. It would be a huge shift for a relatively little gain. How about we just focus on getting rid of Daylight Savings Time for now, then we can ponder switching to UTC and base 12 counting in the future.

MystikIncarnate , 4 months ago

As much as time is a constant thorn in my side, both time and timezones are a necessary evil.

Others have outlined some of the issues regarding time zones and the abolishment of them so I won’t get into that. What I will say is that time keeping systems generally don’t track time in your local timezone. Technology has long since given up on local time as a measurement. Almost all system clocks for computers, phones, pretty much anything electronic, is almost always stored in UTC, or a time code based on UTC.

And I can hear it now, someone saying " but the time on my $thing is $correctlocaltime, which is not UTC"

Yep, and that’s where the magic happens. While the time is stored as UTC, it’s displayed as local based on your device’s time zone settings. In some cases, like with cellphones, the local timezone is set by GPS. The device gets a very very general idea of where you are from GPS, and sets your timezone appropriately. Windows will do this too based on location awareness, by default. I’m sure os x also does something similar.

When the time is displayed it takes the UTC system time and filters it through the UTC offset based on your timezone, and displays local time, factoring in daylight savings, if applicable.

We’ve silently converted to a single unified time globally, and nobody realizes it has happened because the user interface shows you what you want to see.

dustyData , 4 months ago

Precisely, timezones were the answer to OP’s question. Before timezones every town set their clocks to their local noon as the time when the sun was at the highest point in the sky, which is actually quite a lot of difference even for really close towns. With timezones, everyone in the same time zone has the same clock regardless of where the sun is. We all have the exact same minutes on the clock and the hour is always kept relative to and according to UTC.

HobbitFoot , 4 months ago

You could address Daylight Savings Time by just having people set their own schedule, but it was generally seen as easier for the government to change the clocks.

As others have mentioned, there are typically schedules that are assumed based on time. It is easier from a social setting to keep time universal and adjust based on time zones. The context informed by local time is fast more useful than a standard time.

the_post_of_tom_joad , 4 months ago

Because it:

• 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 at all

kevincox , 4 months ago

causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable

That is a feature, it removes one thing to worry about.

necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time

Yes, I think this is the biggest argument against. It would take a long time to get used to.

convolutes timetables, where present

How?

means “days” are no longer the same as “days”

Same as point 2.

complicates both secular and religious law

How?

is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people

How?

makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world

How? In my opinion it makes it easier.

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

Yes. This is true.

is not simpler at all

Of course it is simpler. You have just removed a huge source of complexity. It still isn’t simple because people will still live their life at different times. But it is simpler.

makeshiftreaper , 4 months ago

means “days” are no longer the same as “days”

Who gets to pick when “noon” is when the sun is usually above their head? Let’s assume Greenwich for posterity sake. That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours. Thus spending your day (time when the sun is up) and your day (the time when you do your work) will not intuitively mean the same thing

complicates both secular and religious law

Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law. At a minimum they’d have to rewrite those laws, at most it’d cause a literal schism

is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people

“We changed how clocks work for almost everyone on the planet to make some nerds’ lives easier. Please go change your planners, clocks, schedules, applications, signs, etc to adjust”

makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world

In most of the world, you can reasonably assume the sun goes up around 7 am and sets around 7. Obviously that changes but you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time. In this new system you’ll need to figure out what times people do most of their activities based off of geological segments of the planet and checking what their “daytime” is. Which is already a problem timezones address

is not simpler at all

On a base level maybe, but after fixing all the other problems it causes the resulting system would likely be just as if not more complicated than our current time system

kevincox , 4 months ago

That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours

No, no one would do this. You would continue living your life when the sun is up, the number on the clock would just be different.

Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law.

So just continue doing this based on the previous schedule? Many religions still celebrate holidays based on alternate calendars and many holidays have strange rules for when they occur. This seems like an incredibly minor issue to me?

We changed how clocks work

Yeah, I agree that the change would be so painful that it isn’t worth it. I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.

you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time

This seems like a very artificial problem. When will you know their time previously but not their location or relative time of day. You will still know what people are doing. Just because you add the magic number based on their location in the world before consulting their schedule instead of after doesn’t change anything. This only seems like a problem if you were magically teleported to another location underground and only have access to a clock.

Donebrach , 4 months ago

“it’s 2 everywhere, why aren’t you awake?”

redcalcium , 4 months ago

I am just arguing that I think the end result would be better. Not much better, but better.

It would be better for whichever countries near the 0 offset (eu if using utc), but massive downgrade for no real benefit for countries near +12h offset (asia pacific). This will be seen as another instance of the west flexing their global power and will take generations to adapt. But if the offset were reversed (asia pacific at 0, the west at +12h) things would go much smoother there.

kevincox , 4 months ago

I think it would be better everywhere. It may be slightly easier if your noon is close to solar noon but really other than Europe and Africa everyone would be in the same boat of having the day number roll over sometime during their waking day. This would probably be the biggest downside but seems like something that language would adapt to quickly. I live at -5 so my day would roll over at 19:00 solar time. So it isn’t like my location is immune to the day rollover issue.

kebabslob , 4 months ago

Grateful for this thread. Never thought about how its actually useful to have different zones to know whether to call or other things. Kinda makes a lot of sense

Treczoks , 4 months ago

That would make 9 to 5 jobs quite a challenge outside Europe and Africa…

4am , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

We would need to know what the normal time to start work in our given region would be. Perhaps we should divide the world up into longitudinal strips to designate where and when stuff like work should start, so that everyone could be synced up. Yeah, that’s be a little weird at borders, but since everyone would be aware of the borders then they’d be aware of the differences across them.

Maybe we could also just offset their time in these zones from each other so that we could standardize the times with the approximate position of the sun! That way, you could know if a local time was meant to be during the day or at night. If we didn’t do that, you’d need to figure it out and adjust your thinking everytime you went anywhere, since “noon” would lose all meaning.

Of course, when there are advantages to having a single time be represented everywhere, maybe we could have a separate time “zone” that encompasses the entire world; and when people need it they could just reference that. Some kind of universal, coordinated time zone…

Oh look, we solved all the problems of your suggestion by re-inventing the current system. Funny, that.

EDIT: alright, without the snark, what I am saying here is: we will need time zones either way, so what’s easier to coordinate: shifting the actual clock time in each zone, or shifting every other possible schedule, every person’s perception of what happens when, with each zone change? And also, UTC or Coordinated Universal Time does provide you with a single, global, same-everywhere time to use for coordination. It’s just seen as nerdy to use it, so no one in civilian life really does. Which is why you gotta go google what time a game is releasing when it’s not in your time zone

andthenthreemore , 4 months ago

It wouldn’t make it easier to arrange meetings because you’d have no clue if you were arranging the meeting for when people would be at work, have finished for the day, or fast asleep at night.

kevincox , 4 months ago

I think it would:

1. When talking about time everyone knows exactly what time you mean.
2. It is just as easy to look up when someone is available to meet as it is to look up the time where they are. (And accounts for personal difference in schedules)

For example imagine two conversions:

1. I want to meet with Jim.
2. Jim is in $city.
3. Time in $city is 7h ahead of me.
4. So if Jim gets off work at 5 then we should meet at 9:30.
5. “Jim do you want to meet at 4:30?”
6. “My time or your time?”
7. “Your time”.
8. “Sorry, I actually quit work at 4. How about 3:30?”
9. “Adjust your local 9:30 to 8:30.”
10. “That’s a bit early for me, can we split the difference for 4?”
11. “Sure”

vs

1. I want to meet with Jim.
2. Jim is in $city.
3. Work hours in $city are 14:00-22:00.
4. My work hours are 21:00-05:00
5. "Jim do you want to meet at 04:30?"
6. “Sorry, I actually quit work at 4. How about 03:30?”
7. “That’s a bit early for me, can we split the difference for 4?”
8. “Sure”

It isn’t much difference, but it is easier.

1. Instead of converting time and assuming work hours you just look up work hours. This is at most the same, but if the person’s work hours are not “normal” for their location skips a step.
2. Requires no conversion, less room for mistakes.

Infynis , 4 months ago

What you do is you have both, kind of like we already do, but with the global time being the default rather than local time. So, if I were to look at my phone right now, it would say something like 1433 9:33AM.

When referencing the time to people I know to be local, I’d use the local time, but any time confusion could occur, I’d use the global time. We have everything in place already, we just need people to get used to knowing what time it is UTC

kevincox , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I doubt most people would use local time in their day-to-day life if global time is the default. You would just get used to the new schedule the same way that you have gotten used to the current one based on local time.

I do think that it might be useful to have something like a “world clock” when traveling. So your clock may say “14:33, like 09:33 at home”. But I’m not even convinced how useful this would be. Once you remember one or two timeframe references or if you can see the sun you will have a rough idea of what time-of-day it is anyways. And generally the local schedule will vary a bit from your home schedule anyways so having exact local-equivalent time will probably not be that valuable.

Infynis , 4 months ago

I agree, and once people get used to it, we can phase local time out. But we’ll definitely need it to begin with

otp , 4 months ago

I feel like this is something that would only benefit well-off people in the developed world at the inconvenience of less well-off people around the world.

“This would make it easier to coordinate digital meetings with my colleagues at my international corporation!” Lol

oktoberpaard , 4 months ago

Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.

Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.

kevincox , 4 months ago

you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country

Don’t you need to do this anyways? Different businesses open at different times. Different people work at different times. In some countries restaurants and shops tend to open relatively later and in some they open relatively earlier.

Really it just saves a step. From:

1. It is 12:00 here.
2. Is is 9:00 there.
3. Do they open at 9?

To:

1. Is is 12:00 here.
2. Do they open at 12?

Sure, step 3 can often be guessed. (It is highly likely that a business is open at 14:00 local time) But you still need to look up an exact number to convert from local time to target time. So instead you just look up when they open (or what time businesses are usually open in that place).

oktoberpaard , 4 months ago

Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.

Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.

Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?

kevincox , 4 months ago

I don’t think we would entirely remove the concept of a timezone. Your computer would likely have some sort of proxy for “day time”. Likely even some time offset from a reference. You would just talk in term of global time. But when you snooze an email “until tomorrow” your email client would still have some notion of “when I start work tomorrow” is.

I think you are sort of assuming that we will just be transported into this new world. But you have to account for the fact that language would adapt. With this mindset every change is a bad one. I agree that the transition would be incredibly painful. So painful that it almost certainly isn’t worth it. But that doesn’t mean that the other system is worse. It can be better, but too different to be worth adopting it.

Let’s meet the 2nd of January!

I agree that this is probably the biggest issue. It would take a lot of getting used to. But I’m sure that our language would adapt. And if this is the biggest problem I will take it over not knowing what times people are talking about any day of the week.

_haha_oh_wow_ , 4 months ago

We do (known as Zulu/Military time, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time Coordinated) but it’s not convenient for the average person to use locally, so almost everyone defaults to whatever their time zone is.

boatswain , 4 months ago

I’m a proponent of this myself. I think the big barrier to just using UTC everywhere is with the clock as a symbol: right now if you’re watching a movie or a TV show and see someone’s alarm going off at 6:00, you know “oh, they’re a pretty early riser.” If everyone used UTC, that time could be local noon, or the person could be late for work, out any number of other things.

That also applies to when people move to a new place; if I’m used to having lunch at 20:00 UTC and then move across the country, suddenly lunch is at 17:00 UTC. Symbols are really important to people, so I think these are both problematic. Meetings would be easier, but offline life would be harder.

usualsuspect191 , 4 months ago

Exactly, because right now knowing the time also tells you the time of day which is super important information. Getting rid of timezones is prioritising the wrong thing when we think about time: rarely do we care what the clock shows in a different place, we care about what it means.

Removing that meaning is a step backwards. There’s no point having all of our clocks show the same number if that doesn’t mean anything anymore.