Meters by themselves don't solve anything. But the whole metric system makes a lot of sense; everything is a power of ten, a cubic centimeter equals a milliliter, which makes length=>volume conversion trivial, etc.
From infancy, seconds, minutes and hours are ingrained in our minds. 60 is also a beautiful number, being divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. Given a time, like 10:42AM, a person can conjure feelings, instincts and memories about that time. Using a system based on 1000 "beats" would make time measurement meaningless for a very long time.
Outside of the Internet, most "normal" people communicate predominately with people in their own area and timezone, making the benefit of no timezones moot.