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.
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.
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.
Creating an entirely new calendar would be easiest on an entirely new planet.
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...
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.
Yeah, it's kind of fun to think about...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone?
/me hugs HN and will never compare it to Reddit again.
It's only used by guys who -must- use it. Air plane drivers, strategic guys, comm center operators.
Everyone else uses the local time.
I suspect if UTC / zulu were really the bee's knees some general would mandate everyone use it.
Heck, they got me - a dumb American from the sticks - to think in metric pretty easily. UTC would be a breeze.