In Australia, Santa is sometimes depicted lying on a beach. On December 25th, it is the height of the summer down under. The great thing about the date system is that it’s the same everywhere. Imagine what it’d be like if it was November in the Northern Hemisphere and May in the Southern Hemisphere.
Why can’t the same philosophy be applied to time? Scrap time zones and settle on one – UTC or GMT. No, it doesn’t involve Australians becoming nocturnal. The time which people would wake up would simply vary. For example, people in the PST time zone (GMT-8) would wake up at 0:00 instead of 8:00 and would go to sleep some time around 15:00 UTC (23:00 PST).
There is no real good reason why everyone needs to start work at 9AM local and finish at 5PM local. The only thing which would change is the timezone. The benefits of doing this would be that whenever you write a date on the internet you don’t need to mention timezone or offset. Travellers won’t need to change their clock all the time and calculating how long a flight takes if it leaves Heathrow at 12:00 local and arrives in Rome at 15:00 local becomes simple.
No longer would CNN International be displaying the time of their evening news bulletin in a dozen time zones and I suspect it’d also simplify advertising for TV programmes in the US of A. On the internet, people often forget to specify a time zone. This leads to confusion. The same applies to e-mail; you can recieve an e-mail before it was even sent.
I only suggest GMT (or UTC if you don’t want to give Greenwich credit) is because its generally seen as the universal timezone.
Metric Time
Slightly off-topic: At Wikipedia I discovered that there was an attempt at metrication of time during the French Revolution:
Time has resisted metrication. During the French revolution there was an attempt at a decimal time system with 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and 10 hours in a day (100,000 seconds in a day as opposed to 86,400 currently—a metric second would be thus 14% shorter). The proposed system also included a ten-day week, which was probably its main reason for failure. The church and the people objected and the system was dropped. It is also interesting to note that the Chinese calendar had an almost identical decimal time system up until the 17th century.
See Also: Metric time
It would be nice to do things this way, on the Internet and while working with travel across time zones it would be the way to go.
I’d wake up at around 22:30
If we did that we would get the same type of problems:
Example new time:
I am quite tired, had to wake up at 20.30
Old time:
I am quite tired, had to wake up at 04.30
Everybody understand that he/she didn’t get much sleep if he/she waked up at 04.30, the same can not be said about waking up at 20.30 if they do not include their position on the globe.
As you see this would required the exactly the same time zone principle:
We need to know where on the earth a person is before the time would make sense.
You’re suggestion could result in even more misunderstandings than the system we have now, because no mater where on the earth you are as long as you see the time 04.30 you know it means in the morning.
On the other hand I do see the benefits, especially in global business markets like oil or the stock marked.
I think it is an interesting idea, but we already have a Universal time zone which is almost never used and I don’t even think allot of people know it exists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Edit
Actually your argument about santa can be used both ways.
Example: Santa lands on your roof at 02.00.
That statement is universal, he lands on the roof at 02.00 in Australia and in England.
However if we change the system he will land on the roof of a house in Australia at 14.00 and in England 02.00
As I see it there are more disadvantages to get a Universal clock than our current system. And frankly we would have to have a time zone system any way, just to know when a new day will start and end in other parts of the globe.
Fjoggen: I guess your right. I never really thought about it that way. It depends on which way you look at it. At the same time, Australians may complain if I said it’s freezing cold in the middle of December, because down under it’s boiling
It may be more beneficial to switch to UTC as people begin to meet with people in different time zones more often.