Transcription
A map of the world with vertical lines marking the time zones from UTC-12 to UTC+12. It has a legend:
Wrong Time
“Natural time zones” are 15° in longitude. Land in red observes a time other than the zone it lies within. Smaller islands depict their 12 nautical mile territorial sea, for visual effect. In some cases this includes a state’s archipelagic waters.
Plate Carrée projection, WGS-84 datum. December 2018 © International Mapping, all rights reserved.
I prefer the current way — I can be in another state or another country and I know that 7am is a good time for breakfast, around noon is a good time for lunch, and so forth. (If you don’t change latitude sure, just go outside to figure this out, but it’s complicated if it’s overcast, or the latitude isn’t what you’re used to, or…)
Time has a number of meanings — UTC is great for machines, local time is (IMHO) a good concept for humans.
I think local time would work pretty much the same with a single time zone.
Single time zone: You get to a new place and look up what time is good for breakfast here
Many time zones: You get to a new place and look up what time zone you’re in.
Either way you need to look up what the local time is. But with a single time zone, i think the breakfast time and work hours would be a bit better attuned to sunrise/sunset at your location.
To me, the main difference is more philosophical. I think it’d encourage a more global perspective.
Edit to add: it’s more of a pie in the sky wish. I dont think it would be worthwhile to actually remove time zones. It would be very expensive for not a lot of gain. In the same vein, I’d like to:
sort out our calendar (evenly sized months, dates corresponding to weekdays, and not have prime number of weekdays),
sort out our time units. Lets keep it all in the same base (not 24h days and 60min per hour)
transition to a base-12 numeric system. It’s just much more satisfying.
Checking the time zone ones (or more like your phone just switching automatically) vs having to remember the offset every time until you’ve gotten used to it. I’d go with the first one every time
Problem with a single time zone is working across them. They’re a huge pain in the ass, but it would be even worse without them. Keeping track of who is in what time zone is difficult, but keeping track of everyone’s schedule without using them as a placeholder would be horrible. ‘what time is a good time for breakfast where you are’ and then doing the math anyway just isn’t as convenient as ‘oh, it’s already 5pm where you are’
I feel time zones would be documented better than local lunch times.
That’s an interesting idea, but I disagree to some extent. Although, I really love the idea of having a single unified global time, it would make traveling inconvenient.
While staying in a different part of the world, you would need to translate local times to your home time. For example, 21:30 may sound like evening to you, but somewhere else that could be midday, morning or anything else. If you look at museum opening hours, it’s not immediately apparent if it opens just after breakfast or just before lunch time. You would need to do these translations several times a day during your stay to understand when things will happen.
However, time units are an inconsistent mess, and the calendar is a total disaster. If we need another french revolution to fix that, I’m not going to stand in its way.
Well, sorta — but it’s no effort at all because my timekeeping device (phone) does this automatically.
For me, the time of day is internalized in a way that I think is hard to switch. Same as how I was raised with imperial units — even though I prefer (and use professionally) metric, the intuition can be a little harder to get. But to each their own of course :)