Can somebody explain what benefits we have from having time zones _at all_? They are an absolute mess: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Tim... Wouldnt it be easier to have one time for the whole planet, like we have one date for the whole planet? Is there some reasoning behind it or is it just another case of historical baggage? There seems to be no other rationale behind it than allies and trading partners wanting to have the same or comparable time display.
There is a lot to be said for baggage. You mess with stuff like that at great peril.
We already have a great example for this: the military.
The military operates on zulu time for things like air operations. You want to know exactly when the C-130 is going to arrive, not screw around with offsets or local time diffs.
But they still operate for mundane stuff on local time: 'Assemble for formation at 0745.' 'Mess opens at 0530'. Like that.
Because we live on a big globe and people like having '0530' be 'too early in the morning' no matter where you are.
I fail to understand how this connects to the very real problem. The issue is a fact, you talk fiction.
Going down that route though: You are right, that this stuff is completely arbitrary and probably a heritage of some sorts. But it's deeply ingrained.
Imo:
The world would be a better place if everyone would drive on the right (haha!) side. Why don't we fix it overnight?
The world would be a better place with only one (and simple) calendar. Go ahead, propose one.
The world would be a better place without discussions about date and time _formats_. You know how much these cost?
The world would be a better place without different units, depending on country. Can we please drop feet and whatever other body parts were used? It's "historical baggage".
The world would be a better place if we had just one country with one legislation and one global set of rights.
(Obligatory link: http://worldtimebuddy.com - which I found through this site - is regularly the most awesome utility the web has to offer for me)
See, I don't really disagree with you. But you're a dreamer if you discuss about whether we really should depend on time zones. And in my book a couple of issues are more important to fix before we tackle that problem and introduce a stardate of some sorts.
>The world would be a better place with only one (and simple) calendar. Go ahead, propose one.
A hobby of mine is thinking up "better" ways to do things that I know will never be implemented because the current way is good enough and the barriers to change are huge. My personal favorites are a combination of a new calendar, new lat/long system, and new set of timezones.
The calendar has eight months of 28 days and four months of 35 days (so that every month has an exact number of weeks, so that a given day of the month is always the same day of the week). The first day of the year exists outside of the months (month zero, day one), and would colloquially be "new year's day." When a leap day is needed, it is added as an extra day at the end of the year (month thirteen, day one), and would colloquially be "leap day." The order of the months would be short-long-short-short-long-short-etc (so that each season has one long and two short months).
Whenever I'm in a situation where I can't keep myself engaged by reading or conversation (e.g. waiting in line with no wireless signal), I amuse myself by dreaming up crap like this.
Though not every place on earth has 4 distinct seasons. The tropics have two (wet and dry), and many cultures have/had seasons based on farming practices of their primary crop.
Creating an entirely new calendar would be easiest on an entirely new planet.
I actually gave some consideration to that. There are also places that have six seasons. However, I'm pretty sure that a majority of the world's population lives in temperate zones (I didn't bother researching that, so I could be wrong), which have four seasons.
Even if you decide to go with four seasons, the definitions of the seasons get tricky. You can define them by the solar calendar, or you can define them by environmental conditions; the two tend to be out of phase by about six weeks. I actually figured out a way to make the months line up reasonably well with the four environmental seasons and with the six environmental seasons (which are not of equal length); it wasn't perfect for either, but it was OK for both. I didn't bother keeping notes...
You really think short-long-short-short-long is better? It seems confusing enough to be of dubious value. Why not have seasons and months be equivalent and each equal to 73 days in length? That way you'd had the 50th day of summer, for example. Sure it would require a new season, but you reduce complexity quite a bit and there is no reason to keep the existing 12 month requirement. You can align the first month/season with the first of the year and add a 0-day for leap years.
I wanted the months to be equally-divisible into weeks of equal length. It turns out that the 7-day week is the only really good way to divide the year equally into smallish units and only have one or two days left over.
So you could have four season-months of 13 weeks (91 days) each. But I like the idea of months that are in the same ballpark as lunar cycles. Lunar cycles and solar cycles don't mesh, so you can't have months that perfectly match lunar cycles unless you're willing to have months that float against years the way weeks currently float against months, but then again some people might find that appealing.
That was my initial idea. But then there's no good way to divide them neatly into seasons, whether you want to have two, four, or six.
It does have the advantage that it comes very close to lining up with the lunar cycle, so that the lunar month would only slide very slowly against the calendar month (about half a lunar-month of phase shift per year). And since the definition of "season" is very mushy anyway, maybe thirteen months would be the way to go.
Right now it's tomorrow in Australia. I find it convenient to talk about things I did "on Thursday" at work, rather than the things I did on the local day that spanned Thursday night to Friday morning.
If everyone used UTC you'd still have many of the same problems, just in reverse. For example, you can reasonably guess that in any country, an office will be staffed on weekdays from roughly 9-5 local time. If we all operated on UTC, then you'd need to look up in a big table what times the Sydney office operated.
It is useful to have a shared understanding of where in the day you expect an event to happen. E.g. 1pm is going to be around lunchtime whether you are in Sydney or New York.
Also, dates have exactly the same problems as time zones - the date starts at midnight local time. If lcoal time changes, then for part of the day, so does the date.
Swatch tried it about ten years ago. They divided the day into 1000 units they called "beats" and made watches that showed traditional time and "beat" time. Their prime meridian was at their headquarters in Switzerland and there were no time zones; Swatch time was the same worldwide.
It went nowhere, mainly because it offered nothing we didn't already have. Anyone who wanted/needed a time that was the same world-wide used UTC as they have done for centuries.
It's kind of a shame they went nowhere. Something like Swatch beats would be useful. See, for example, Stack Exchange "days" - I have no idea when they start or finish in my time-zone.
The historical context is that most of the world wants the time to correlate to the sun. Noon is when the sun is (about) overhead, and midnight is when the sun is on the opposite side of the planet. We also have unique daylight savings practices, even within time zones. There is a lot of political discussion that causes this. China, for example, has one single time zone even though geographically it spans about 3 "real" time zones.
We do have a "world time" as well, if you would like to live by it. It's called UTC.
Personally, time zones help me to relate to others in a different part of the world. If I say I got up at 5am, someone on the other side of the world could say "Why did you sleep in so late? I eat lunch at 6am". With a single time, we would need to translate the numbers for local interpretation, otherwise they have no meaning.
In my opinion, there'a lot of value for informal communication that all participants understand that e.g. 8am local time is morning everywhere. E.g. before you fly to another country, you can agree to meet with your hosts at 10am and know intuitively that it's quite sensible time.
But current model is too complicated, mainly due to daylight saving time (DST). If we would get rid of DST, and map timezones based on longitude and country borders (and state borders for larger countries like Russia, USA, Canada), things would be much simpler. Of course, when countries are split or merged, some updates would be needed, but usually then other data (city-country mappings etc.) needs to be updated too, so this wouldn't be that big issue.
