I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
As nice as that would be for code, people would still be left with trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances. The utility provided by time zones is a function for us to take our local time and determine whether or not we're interrupting someone's evening or sleep.
Not to mention, travel alarm clocks everywhere would need to be sold with a book of "reasonable waking times" for different cities, which is really no different than the time zone offsets we have today.
I would completely agree with moving to UTC if we weren't animals beholden to a diurnal sleep cycle.
> trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances
This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up.
Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done.
I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time).
If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.
Wouldn’t you have the same problem of availability though? The issue is not whether the meeting time is the middle of the night - you can do the same thing now by saying the meeting is at 4pm EST and not being concerned about what time it is elsewhere. Making the time UTC everywhere doesn’t resolve that a person in Japan at the same UTC time simply will not attend the meeting because they’re asleep at that time. Switching to UTC everywhere simply changes the question form what time is it there? To are they asleep or awake there? It doesn’t seem like this makes the scheduling aspect easier because regardless of what the clock says you always have to ask the availability question.
This thread is making it very apparent to me that programmers live in a bubble.
Most people on earth don't have to contact someone outside of their timezone even once a week. Some people on earth don't contact anyone outside of their timezone even once a year. Why the heck would anyone suggest make a massively disruptive change to their lives in exchange for making life slightly easier for programmers? That's completely ass backwards. Increasing complexity for programmers in exchange for making user's lives easier is a tradeoff that any good, experienced programmer should always make 100% of the time.
If anything I'd agree with a suggestion made later in the thread : We should move towards infinite time zones, where noon and midnight are always when you expect they are, and smartphones magically tell you exactly where the sun is at the location of the person you are attempting to communicate with.
That other suggestion isn't good either. Let's say there is a train that leaves at a certain time. They will have to provide the exact GPS coordinates for someone to know when they need to be at the train station
That’s not as hard as it sounds. Google maps probably knows the exact location based on the name. Also, the user only needs to know the time at the station and the offset from local time e.g. “train leaves at 3 pm local, the time at the station is about 2 hours ahead of you now”.
The question you ask now is "what time is it in X place?" if you want to know if its reasonable to call someone.
But that is insufficient knowledge. You also need to know their work schedule, when they prefer to sleep, if they are busy that day. You call people regularly who are preoccupied or who just aren't in the mood.
I have two cousins who share a time zone apart from mine, but one works the night shift. So one sleeps 10-18 and works 22-06 their time and the other sleeps 23-07 and works 09-17. If you call one in their in between hours one is just waking up while the other is tired, in the same time zone.
You cannot even just assume "people everywhere wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 within their timezones" because timezones are not consistent between countries, within countries, or across continents. Different cultures have different daily routines and schedules.
This is why people have just gradually, especially in newer generations, gravitated towards asynchronous communication as a default.
On the flipside, if you wanted to ask the question "we are on the same universal time, is it safe to call X?" you are asking a better question anyway since you need to know the regular available schedules of people where that person lives, just not on your presumed "normal" timetable.
Travel alarm clocks are a great topic, because they already require manual intervention for all the aforementioned time zone inconsistencies. To build a working "automatic" travel clock you need a full computer with GPS to do precise location to map you to the TZ database and then to also look up sunrise and sunset because those aren't consistent even with timezones.
An "everywhere is UTC" clock requires just as much hardware, but only one question - when is sunrise here? Because you just set your wakeup time near that if you are diurnal. Which not even everyone is. Especially in the hacking space where there are plenty of night owls.
Time zones don't fix the issue of knowing a good time for something. You have to look up your different offsets and then math it out, which is exactly what you'd do even if the time zones didn't exist.
Except if we did abolish time zones rather than asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" you ask it "is it the waking hours in Melbourne".
In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).
That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.
Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.
If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.
Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.
I agree with you on that, but there's still a piece of this puzzle left unaddressed. Using UTC would improve the clock, but the calendar would end up worse.
This isn't actually discussing abolition of time zones---it's discussing going from ~24 time zones to having only 1 time zone. It essentially maximizes the errors inherent in having a finite number of time zones for an infinite number of locations on the planet.
Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.
Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.
Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"
My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.
Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.
However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W
What does that mean in my own local time zone?
Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.
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It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.
That’s going to make catching your train or plane or trying to do multiple transport connections a nightmare. What time do I have to leave my house driving east to catch the 7pm flight? And note the clocks will change as you drive making it hard to understand if you’re late or not. It also assumes everyone has a device that does this work for you, which would be really tough to work around when it runs out of battery.
Nice essay. Some good points about the past still having time zones so programming might not get any simpler. I think appropriately adjusted "Do Not Disturb" settings on his uncle's phone could have save him a lot of the trouble.
People say this all the time. But if you look at a population density map of China, you realize that the vast majority of people live within the natural GMT+8 range, and the western region is very sparsely populated.
For some context in case anyone was curious, my calculations suggest that ~3/4 of China = ~1 billion people are in the main band of GMT+8 (or slightly east), ~1/4 = ~300 million people are naturally in GMT+7, and only ~2% = 25 million people are at GMT+6 (or slightly west).
The province of Sichuan (capital Chengdu), with a population of ~80 million people, is the most prominent province naturally one time zone west of Beijing.
I imagine they get up when the sun rises (about 9am their time) and go home / retire before the sun sets (about 9pm).
Their days are only "long" in the sense that they probably go to bed after midnight. They still have the same average number of hours in a day as anyone at their latitude and altitude.
That is why all the over-complicated time systems are dumb. You don't actually give yourself more time. You over-complicate reality to suit cultural norms like "the sun rises at 6am" despite the fact most people will grow up never moving that far from where they are born. If the sun rose at 1am people would sleep from 4 to 12, not try to force a standard time schedule of 6am sunrises on an entire population. They already don't - people get up generally around their sunrises everywhere on Earth - they just change clocks to make that sunrise always be around 6am.
Time zones and DST are an accommodation for moving across time zones so no matter where you go you can use the clock as a reference to solar noon, except in the dozens / hundreds of instances where you cannot. The consequence is that the complicated system is hard to track, makes cross-zone communication and scheduling a nightmare, and causes legitimate accidents when people do not know where the date lines are, when the times change, how they change (I think there is a stretch of Russian border where you can go 3 hours forward and backward in time in about 100km).
Or any country, since timezones only have a 1 hour granularity. If you're in Edinburgh (same longitude as Plymouth) this is quite noticable. Be interesting to see the consequences of hyper-local timezones where the sun is always over your head at 12 noon. With modern computing it should be possible to have your watch adjust as you drive east-west ...
Time zones can have any granularity desired. Most are 1 hour, several are 30 minutes (including in India and Australia), and a few are 45 minutes (in New Zealand, for example). There’s no rule though about granularity though.
I agree, besides with most of the tech we use people can set their notifications to not get disturbed while they are sleeping. I don't really care if my lunch is at 20:00 or 12:00, but when I work across time zones and there is a mismatch because of seasonal time change it can get really infuriating. Pilots adopted UTC for similar reasons a long time ago, except in their case the potential mixups had a high risk of fatality rather than annoyance and inconvenience.
What about the poor Hawaiians? For whom it would only be Thursday until early afternoon, at which point it becomes Friday by the UTC overlords' decree.
"When are you free for a meeting?"
"Friday's good for me."
"Should we do Friday afternoon, or sleep on it and meet Friday morning?"
Everyone should start using 24hr clocks as well. It would remove a ton of ambiguities.
Oh, and using ISO8601 everywhere. Dates should always be represented as [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]. Seriously, why do some systems even support other calendar systems?
I live in NZ, I work in California, I get up at 5am in (my) winter, 6am for a few weeks in spring/autumn, 7am in summer - I have breakfast (lunch at) 7/8/9am, I quit at 1/2/3
In case you haven't figured it out DST transitions go the other way in the southern hemisphere - UTC would make so much sense (and for me being at roughly UTC+12 wouldn't be such a big deal)
having said that I'm a big fan of just being on permanent DST, more daylight evening time for people
That will work until Elon Musk opens his Mars settlement. Then we will have to rename "Universal Coordinated Time" to "Earth Coordinated Time" and have separate "Planet Times".
We already have separate planet times, for what it's worth [1].
I can't find it now, but I remember listening to an interview with a scientist involved with one of the Mars rovers who converted his whole family to Martian time for a few weeks or months after his rover landed, since those were the hours he was keeping for work.
And good riddance to the 9-5 workday; it's a relic of an work-era long gone. In terms of poetry and art, well yes, people will not quite understand the reference eventually, but this is already the case with older art (who understands the references in 20's folk music?)
Also if we could decimalize it too that would be great. Not sure if I want 10 hours or day, or ten in the morning and ten afternoon, but would be a big improvement over the current dozen.
I'd rather they just remove numbers from most 'clocks' (for humans) and instead define things like "morning" "lunch" "evening" as official designations relative to UTC (but humans would normally not see that offset) and list times like...
how does that make anything easier or better? Every locality will still have a "morning" designation, so when you schedule a meeting with your coworker across the country, you still need to look up his "morning" time so you don't schedule it before he gets to work.
The Japanese came up with such a 'temporal hour system'. An ingenious clock to display time that changes with the seasons is this Myriad Year Clock built in 1851
No it wouldn't -- users of your applications will still want to see "human" time in different areas, so rather than a (relatively) well defined Timezone standard, you'll need to keep a table of accepted working hours, meal times, etc for each region.
At least now you can tell them that it's 5pm in their selected area so they can decide what that means.
If everyone was on UTC and I want to schedule a meeting with my coworker across the country, I still need the application to tell me what time standard business hours are wherever he is located
So the developer still has to do the UTC->Localtime lookup.
Plus, when I travel, I have to keep a chart of local "human-time", so I know that when it's 03:00, it's time for lunch.
It's cool in VR goggles, but logo-detection has been a thing in the film/tv industry for a long time. For instance, up until a couple years ago US shows had to edit out corporate logos when broadcast into the UK due to advertising rules.
