I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.
* I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake.
* They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they mean mine or theirs?
Without timezones:
* I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?
* They said the meeting was at 18:00. I know exactly when that is.
* If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
I agree with DST and 12-hour clocks, those are antiquated and mostly pointless. If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another. The complication is that you are interacting with humans that have different hours than you do, getting more different as you get farther away. Without time zones, you still have those complications, and you trade the set of time zone complications for another set of complications, by having your time completely divorced from your local daylight and working hours.
There are stupidities with modern time zones, but the concept exists for a good reason.
Like having to coordinate meetings around the world or figuring out what time it is for their friend on the other side of the world. Most people never deal with any of that. They just want it to be 12:00 and bright out when they eat lunch (or whenever they eat lunch).
Suppose we set the universal time to the current -12h meridian. Everyone works with that exact same time. If I receive a scheduled meeting at 15.00 I know exactly when to be there (wow, that's late for me!). If glance at the clock and see that it is 4.00, I know it's time for my afternoon tea, and that the sun is still out.
I think people would get used to this line of thinking very rapidly, and would scheduling would be arguably made easier, because the proposed time would not need to be parsed by anyone.
The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones don't help or hurt that. It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours. Maybe they could say "Tuesday around 1400" and we would both know when that was without considering the offset.
> If you get rid of time zones, you don't simplify anything. You trade one set of complications for another.
You do make a lot of things simpler by not having to figure out offsets. Sometimes you still will, but it will be less often.
Instead if the working day begins at 23:00 (as would be the case for Pacific time) for me and 8:00 for you, but the meeting is already at 1:00/10:00, it is unclear if you mean "at 1:00 of Wednesday, which is on the working day that started Tuesday at 23:00" or "at 1:00 of Tuesday, on the working day that started Monday at 23:00".
In 99% of cases of my communications it's perfectly clear because it's the same for both of us. The GP said that without a local timezone Tuesday Morning would be ambiguous even in a local context.
But seriously, in DST world, the numerical offsets (-6, ...) are confusing enough, adding yet another "simpler" notation would only increase confusion.
> * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake.
> Without timezones:
> * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. She's an early bird, so is she on the early side of that, likely. What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?
This is actually the same thing. In both cases you have to know or look up that there's an 8 hour difference between the two of you.
The bits about the seasons and being an early bird apply equally to both cases, so it's not really relevant to the comparison.
In the latter case, you do need to do math, because what you are getting is meaningless number and then you need to convert it to some kind of "how long after typical start of day" format to get information you actually want.
Imagine multiple world clocks, in the typical Hollywood command bunker look. Instead of each clock having hour hands pointing in different directions, they'd all have the same hour hand position, but different highlighted zones for waking hours (or "shift 1", "shift 2", "shift 3", for 24h duty).
> Without timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It rises at 13:00 here, but she's a quarter of the way way around the world. I have to look up their typical waking hours. ... What time does the sun rise there? How much does that change over the seasons?
You aren't doing a fair comparison. In your "with timezones" example, you are considering it trivial to look up/remember what timezone Germany is in, but in your "without timezones" example, you are making it out to be more difficult to look up/remember what the "day-hours" of Germany would be.
In a world without timezones, you could just Google "what are they day hours in Germany" just like you can Google "what is the timezone in Germany" now. And in fact, it would be much easier to reason about - if you know that the time is currently 10:00, and the day starts at 18:00 in Germany, then you don't need to do any more math, you can just wait until it's after 18:00 to call her.
> If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day?
Again, you're assuming that language would not be different in a world without timezones. It's a completely unrealistic scenario, language always evolves to fit our real needs.
We have all kinds of low-level protocols for coordinating all manner of things. Distilling a coherent system of agreeing on a timezone difference, between two communicating entities and presenting that to the user at any time would be quite basic.
We have location data for all, at all times. We have a local, accurate clock. There's little else we'd need. What remaining issues are all UX. Apple could roll such a thing out parallel on all their multitude devices and it'd be basically trivial.
Is it maybe just habit that we gravitate to a manual process, when an automated one would be rather easy in this situation?
On iOS, the existing clock app already provides a basic form, tapping the plus button allows the addition of multiple zones and provides useful additional context in the form of offsets and what day it is relative to the users local date and time.
That's halfway there, it would only need contact awareness to be able to provide a solution.
I think it needs to be said here: cross-timezone scheduling and datetime math are extremely rare relative to people's daily experience. It may not be obvious to us here, because we're much more likely to be dealing with the unusual case - building distributed systems, having international users/customers, working for multinational companies or cooperating with companies from other countries, etc. Almost nobody ever does that, and it makes no sense to make everyone do extra mental arithmetic when thinking or talking about other places, just for the sake of a minority of white-collar workers who can't be arsed to add a second column to their Outlook calendar, or double-check when they have a Zoom meeting.
Getting rid of timezones would make most of everyday matters location-dependent. Timezones allow us to use the same numbering of times of day regardless of where any of us lives. 08:00 is morning. 22:00 is night. 12:00-14:00 is around when people have lunch. Etc. We can talk about our days in all kinds of ways (movies, plays, songs, novels, guides, etc.), retaining a precise numerical scale (vs. much less useful terms like "morning" or "afternoon"), and everyone everywhere can relate. Getting rid of the timezones makes this impossible.
Note the difference between talking about daily experience with people around the world, vs. doing things in sync with people around the world. Timezones make the former trivial, and the latter easy. Removing timezones makes the latter trivial, but the former hard. Hard enough that people would quickly recreate timezones for convenience.
Most people in europe keep scheduling meetings between 14 and 16 which is pretty much lunch time here in Spain so most of the time I am having lunch during my video calls or take a quick bite in between calls without a proper break.
This may seem pedantic, but the confusion causes real problems with software.
The problem is, say, I have a colleague in Spain. I ask him for a meeting today at 0800 CET, which for him means sunrise was at 0746, while I in Munich have had sunrise and got woken up by the cats at 0652.
I expect time zones will fade away then.
No need to rush it prematurely though
I can't see how one would only contact in touch with people in a single timezone, unless one only wants to have contact with people in continental Europe (excluding e.g. Portugal and Finland), or people in a single timezone in the US. Timezones are everywhere. The earth is a sphere, so.. can't be avoided.
Most people we interact with on this site are likely in a different timezone, for example.
What I hate is DST. That's not only useless, it's problematic. Heck, my old mother never managed to handle the change this last fall, in her nursing home - meals didn't come at the optimal time, she got undernourished, it destroyed her sleep cycles, and her health went all downhill.
You look up her profile in teleappnal, and it says she's online, so you give her a call. Easy. Or, you book a calendar appointment like anybody civilized, and she either accepts or rejects it. (Telephones are another abhorrent Victorian invention which we'll get rid of, and sooner than you think.)
In both cases you need to do some maths. You know early birds wake up at 11 where you live. If you know she's 8h ahead, just add 8. So, 19 is when you should call.
For calling people nothing really change. Adapting when moving somewhere else is the tricky bit. If I move to another city or country I just adjust my clock and automatically know when things will be open, working hours, etc. Otherwise, whenever you move you have to keep mentally reminding yourself that the work day starts at 12 here, not 7 like I'm used to and so on.
So many issues, like having to relearn the clock when you are in another timezone. I’ll meet you for lunch at 06.00! Life is based around the sun.
Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though, whether that was GMT or something less euro centric. So everyone would understand “we have a zoom meeting at 11.00 WT” instead of having to decide which timezone to refer to.
Don't we already have that with UTC / Zulu time?
I usually see Americans treat Eastern Time as a standard, with references to Pacific sometimes. In the EU, where I am, CET is the usual timezone used for specifying a time internationally. And regardless of the location, it's very common for people to specify a time in their local timezone first and leave it to the other party to figure out what the difference is.
I haven't encountered situations like someone saying "let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC" to set up an EU-US meeting.
My colleagues and I do this, but we're often involving 3, 4, 5+ timezones. Everyone knows their own offset from UTC, but I easily forgot whether Australia is on DST this month.
So whenever I specify a time with someone that could be in a different timezone, I would either make sure that I am using some application that solves it for me, or I would AT LEAST include the timezone.
Maybe I'm just not encountering the same problems that you do.
There is only one good alternative, which would be to place the date change line in the middle of the Atlantic (between UTC-3 and UTC-2) and the fundamental time zone in Japan or somewhere Australia (UTC+9/UTC+10).
Greenland is probably the best reason to keep Greenwich as the reference time zone. :) Most of the population (so to speak) is on -13 to -12. I have no idea if the people there have more ties to continental Europe and Iceland, or to Labrador.
If I need to call someone in their morning, I need to determine the same offset.
I have plenty experience with both ends using UTC regardless of where in the world they are. It's much easier. Either 0425 works for both or we need to adjust one way or the other. I still need to know that your schedule is four hours ahead of mine, but we don't need to do math to figure out what time 0425 is. The cognitive overhead is diminished.
Time for living things is primarily based on the course of the sun above their heads.
Hence timezones to adjust between the local needs, and the worldwide synchronization.
UTC is plenty enough to offer a good sync reference for distributed teams. Swatch beats was a good idea too, but failed.
I object on the grounds we could no longer say it's five o'clock somewhere in the world when we open a bottle in the daytime.
Hang on a second...
So, no matter what time zone you pick as the reference, by definition the international date line is 12 hours away from your reference.
See:
I guess you could potentially have some sort of graphic to show the same thing for sunrise vs sunset ... but as you point out, the maths needs to be done either way, so why get rid of a system that works pretty well?
DST is the real enemy here.
'Tomorrow clock time or tomorrow after the Sun rises?'
But if we got rid of time zones, you’d need new ways to distinguish between tomorrow meaning ‘after the clock ticks over 24:00’ bs ‘after the next night cycle’ because they would not be the same thing.
To be fair the same ambiguity occurs now if you are, say, parting ways with someone after midnight and you say ‘see you tomorrow’, but you actually mean later that same calendar day.
But I think losing the ability to make use, in everyday local conversations with people in the same place as you, of concepts like ‘tomorrow afternoon’, would be kind of a dealbreaker for time zone abolition.
It's always amusing to me how opponents of the idea of abolishing time zones assume that everything will stay the same, except, well abolishing of time zones. Apparently in the moment we do so, humanity will be become incapable of adjusting even the slightest. It will be impossible to invent a couple of new terms to let people communicate easily about time. It will be impossible to replace time zone maps and time zone aware clocks with ones that show regular office hours in different regions, &c.
For the record, I'm not even really for abolishing time zones, but the fact that the word "tomorrow" would become slightly less useful is not a particularly significant reason.
So I guess I'm in the "this could work" camp.
We got rid of 6-hours clocks and it only took a few centuries, there's hope!
1am on Tuesday is known as "Monday Night".
I believe humanity is just one generation away from being able to get rid of the idea that noon is 12:00 and 24:00 is midnight.
I think I've heard all the arguments against and they all boil down to "no, old days are best".