Why isn’t this a popular thing?
I’m a fan of Swatch Internet Time myself!
After reading the lack of consensus in the comments, I’ll just be over here using decimal time, confusing everyone around me. ;)
I would venture to guess it had to do with noon. It would have always been easy to say sunrise, sunset or noon even before a clock or sundial were invented. Remember there were no aircraft flying through the timeshifts. The effects of time on long distance travel were negligable if noticeable at all. Communications also traveled slowly. Once technology introduced clocks, you could see how your noon no longer aligned with the sun a couple hundred miles east or west. Your clock would not match the place you are visiting as noon had hands both pointing straight up as where the sun would also be located at that time. Your question only becomes relevant when we get light speed communication like radio and telegraph.
“Good afternoon German friend how is the weather today?” “WHY ARE YOU RINGING ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, AMERICAN FRIEND!?” Not a real conversation, but you can imagine.
The answer: people hate change.
Why arent we using only X because Y is inefficient.
Because it rather tells time… sun-wise, if that explanation makes sense. If you want something worldwide for some large event, you simply mention the timezone.
What we should eliminate is summer and winter time.
Time is confusing. We should all just use Unix Timestamp. Meet me at 1748918019!
That’s literally how computerized calendars work, so unironically this
Are we could use .beat time
Once upon a time, when airplanes where not a thing and real time communication implied a distance that you can scream to… When only snail mail or telegraph where available and people traveled by boat and train…
You would never experience jet lag nor have the problem of knowing if people far away was ssleeping or not.
In this scenario, when time was standardized and organized, it only made sense that everybody would wake up and go to bed at the same time no matter where their lived (more or less, of course ,you get the meaning). Thats when time zones where defined, so that people traveling by boat or train would keep waking up day after day at the same time of the day.
Without time zones, life would be quite difficult to organize and understand. Ask to the Chinese, that live in the Beijing timezone in a country spanning three time zones. They keep using mixed local and Beijing times… And catching trains and airplanes is a mess for this reason…
No, timezones are really needed. Not having them would be weird and messy.
They do on their servers. For human activities, having times relative to the diurnal cycle makes more sense than having to do the mental arithmetic.
Because my noon is the best noon, and your silly noon is unreasonable. It happens at 4am, you silly goose.
Fantastic article. Never seen it. Thanks for sharing!
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Day/night cycle, the local time usually matches with the local day/night cycle which is far more relevant than international communication of time
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Tradition, some countries have weird time zones, but it’s a lot of effort for little gain to change that
Even though there is a day night cycle, the time for sunrise varies by location anyways (and they also change during different time of the year)
We already arbitrarily decide a number to be “morning” anyways, what’s the harm in having each place have their own time range for “morning”?
It’s mostly with how society decides that the standard office hours is 9-5, if we are not restricted by such constraints, then it really matters less.
at some point we would have to shift the date and it’s much more convenient to do that at night
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Considering general relativity exists, it’s fitting that each place has its timezone.
People live their lives, they don’t live abstractions on paper. People sleep, wake, do things.
Why would it be? What would planetary time solve that local time makes an obstacle?
Imagine if every time you read a news report, or work of fiction, or gardening manual, or anything where the time of day is relevant, you’d need to know what longitude the text originated at and then mentally convert it to your familiar local time before you know whether the events described are in the morning, afternoon, or night.
