[subego]

It should always be the same time everywhere in the world. No time zones.

I like the idea so much I’m even willing to make the sacrifice and have the numbers based on GMT.

[Waragainstsleep]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time

[subego]

Universal? It should not be GMT on Mars.

[Laminar]

Phrases that are currently universal now become location-specific.

"I got to sleep in until 1am!"

"We went out to the bars and partied until 4pm!"

"My boss made me stay at work until 8am last night."

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Trying to wrap my brain around this. So some of us would need to get used to sleeping from 1:00-8pm and going to work at 9:30pm?

I don’t see how this is helpful. You still need to know what time of day it is in other zones. A meeting at 3pm might be in the middle of the day for some people and in the middle of the night for other people.

So if you still need to know time of day, then what’s the point? The current regime does allow everyone to know what approximate time of day it is in other areas.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

The more I thought about it, the more I concluded that global time is a stupid fuckin idea.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

So if you still need to know time of day, then what’s the point? The current regime does allow everyone to know what approximate time of day it is in other areas.

It would hurt your ability to schedule the meeting for a convenient time for other timezones, but once the meeting is scheduled, it would be easy for everyone to know exactly when the meeting is. Same with global product releases, website go-lives, live tv broadcasts, etc.

[subego]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

Phrases that are currently universal now become location-specific.

"I got to sleep in until 1am!"

"We went out to the bars and partied until 4pm!"

"My boss made me stay at work until 8am last night."

These all have equivalents.

“I got to sleep until afternoon/after midnight”

“We partied until the sun almost came up”

“Double overtime, motherfucker!”

[ghporter]

There are some useful applications of paying attention to “Coordinated Universal Time” (with “universal” being more “all of us first world countries have agreed on this”). The initialism for this is “UTC” which is also “universal” in that it doesn’t adhere to either the English or French word order. This is an internationally recognized version of “Greenwich Mean Time”…the international community couldn’t come up with a better “zero” meridian than Greenwich, so they all agreed to use the system that the British Empire had very effectively imposed on much of the world before the end of the 19th Century.

One application of attending to UTC might be if you work with others who are very distant; where your sunrise is at a markedly different time from someone else’s. If both parties simply agree to use UTC time in their interactions, it is very helpful.

But completely doing away with time zones has a load of challenges. One of the biggest is tradition…the whole “I go to bed at 11PM” thing being only a small part of that. Since we in the US have not successfully gotten most of the population to let go of the “traditional” measurement system based on “whatever the freak we think of today”, and even just using metric measurements, letting go of “noon” being somewhere roughly near when the sun appears at zenith isn’t going to fly anytime soon.

Time zones are (theoretically, anyway) structured so that at each equinox the sun appears directly overhead at the geographic middle of the zone, with the zone’s boundaries roughly 30 minutes on either side of that. Amazingly this “30 minute” distance is pretty darn close to 500 miles at the equator, as the Earth’s circumference is approximately 24,900 miles.

And time zones are essentially a simple offset from Coordinated Universal Time. The US Eastern Time Zone is UTC -5 hours, Central time is -6, and so on. While I sit here typing, the time is close to 11:30am Central Standard Time. which means that it is close to 19:30 in London. So really you and your distant coworker who agree to use UTC instead of local times are just skipping over communicating about your local time zone offsets, and each of you does your own conversion without bothering the other about it.

I think the concept of time zones is useful and practical. I do NOT think that there is anything useful, practical or otherwise beneficial to shifting a time zone’s offset for SEVEN months out of the year, as if cutting a foot off of one end of a blanket and sewing it onto the other end makes that blanket longer. But that’s another discussion…

[subego]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

letting go of “noon” being somewhere roughly near when the sun appears at zenith isn’t going to fly anytime soon

All I’m proposing is getting rid of the “roughly” part. Noon would become precisely the time the sun is at its zenith in any given location. What we’d be getting rid of is slaving noon to the time on a clock.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by subego 

All I’m proposing is getting rid of the “roughly” part. Noon would become precisely the time the sun is at its zenith in any given location. What we’d be getting rid of is slaving noon to the time on a clock.

Ah, that's different. But we already ignore where exactly the sun is in the sky - whether or not we're on standard time. And this isn't some standardization thing, but simply the way the planet moves and where we are on it.

Just as sunrise moves north and south of due east through the seasons, the sun reaches its highest point at different times throughout the day as the year progresses. In the northern hemisphere, sunrise, "noon", and sunset move southward between the summer solstice and the winter solstice, then move northward until the next solstice. One's latitude also impacts where the sun appears in the sky, including sunrise, "noon", and sunset.

So maybe I'm not grasping what you want out of this. There are so many moving pieces dependent on coordinating activities at a specific time that some globally agreed upon time measurement standard (like UTC) is essential for modern life. Time zones simply adjust the relative day/night hours based on longitude but synchronized with UTC. What is the issue with having "noon" not match the sun's position on any given day?

[subego]

Read “all I’m proposing” as “all I’m proposing in terms of this specific point on how we define noon”, not “this is my entire point. Though as an astronomy buff, I do tend to prefer those definitions.

Give me a bit. I’ll generate a more refined pitch.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

It would hurt your ability to schedule the meeting for a convenient time for other timezones, but once the meeting is scheduled, it would be easy for everyone to know exactly when the meeting is. Same with global product releases, website go-lives, live tv broadcasts, etc.

Right, but you still need to know what time of day it is in all those places…i.e. time zones!

Aren’t you just trading one thing to know — e.g. that 12pm in NY is 9am in California — for another, more amorphous piece of necessary information, e.g. that 10am GT is lunchtime in NY and start-of-workday in California?

[OreoCookie]

As someone who regularly interacts with people from all sorts of time zones (Asia, Europe and the Americas), I fail to see what this would solve. Yes, 15:00 UTC is 15:00 UTC everywhere, but I still would need to keep in mind that my Chilean colleagues are asleep. Unless you force people all across the globe to synchronize their daily routines as well.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

Right, but you still need to know what time of day it is in all those places…i.e. time zones!

For the planners, yes, but for the participants, no.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

So what’s the benefit, then? I feel that time zones are only used to determine what time me of day it is in different locales.

With the internet, the old issue of calculating time zones are no longer a problem — it’s either calculated automatically or easy to determine.

What’s the point of removing “what time is 9am EST in New Zealand” in favour of “what time of day is 9am in NZ”? You’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

[subego]

The benefits seem, I dunno… self-evident?

It’s always the same time on the same day everywhere on the planet. No date-line. No seasonal adjustments, no walk 10 feet and it’s an hour later. It permanently and globally eliminates all confusion about what time it is because there’s no longer anything to be confused about.

[OAW]

Originally Posted by subego 

It should always be the same time everywhere in the world. No time zones.

I like the idea so much I’m even willing to make the sacrifice and have the numbers based on GMT.

Agreed. My wife thinks I'm crazy.

OAW

[reader50]

Originally Posted by subego 

All I’m proposing is getting rid of the “roughly” part. Noon would become precisely the time the sun is at its zenith in any given location. What we’d be getting rid of is slaving noon to the time on a clock.

Sun-dial time everywhere. Could also be seen as switching from approx 24 time zones (there's actually a few more), to 1440 - one for every minute instead of every hour. I assume polar regions would use GMT?

This is how it was done in tribal times - all times were local. But it sounds inconvenient for a global civilization. Maybe we could switch back to local time after The Fall, and keep time zones until then.

[subego]

What noon means would be sundial, but what constitutes “three hours after the start of a banker’s business day can be set to anything.

It can also move, which of course is what it does anyways twice a year in 48 states.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Originally Posted by subego 

The benefits seem, I dunno… self-evident?

It’s always the same time on the same day everywhere on the planet. No date-line. No seasonal adjustments, no walk 10 feet and it’s an hour later. It permanently and globally eliminates all confusion about what time it is because there’s no longer anything to be confused about.

It feels like you’re ignoring the why here.

The why is so that the time of day is universal. 6am in EST is roughly the same time of day as 6am in New Zealand: it’s somewhere around sunrise.

Your solution eliminates time zone confusion but adds time of day confusion. We know it’s 6am here, and it’s just after sunrise; and we know that it’s also 6am in Mew Zealand but have no idea if it’s midday, dinner time, or middle of the night.

Do you know what could solve this problem for Global Time? ESTABLISHING LONGITUDINAL ZONES THAT WE ALL HAVE TO MEMORIZE IN ORDER TO DETERMINE WHETHER 6AM IS MIDDLE OF THE DAY OR NIGHT IN INDONESIA.