I wish we would go one step further and just stick to UTC as well. That way when we try to set up a video conference at 0900 we don't have to translate between time zones. We can just ask if 0900 works, and everyone would know what time that is.
There's no reason 1200 should be midday. If we changed this today the next generation would never stop to think about how "weird it is that it's dark at 1200" where they live.
Time zones tend to come into effect in two situations: when you need to communicate across them, and when you need to travel between them. In the former situation, I agree that having one universal time would simplify things. Also agreed that as long as you tend to stay in one area, it wouldn't be a big deal to get used to dawn at 17:00 or whatever. What I think would be tricky is if you did a lot of traveling. With time zones, you can simply change your watch/phone to local time, then work based on that. With universal time, you would need to either constantly work out what time morning/lunchtime/business hours/etc. are in this new place, or you would have to change your watch/phone to some fictional time to simulate the times you're used to. Either one seems significantly trickier.
Of course, nothing stops people from using UTC only for the situation where it's really useful: long-distance coordination. (And as mentioned in other comments, that's often done already.)
The two situations where time zones are relevant is a very good observation, but I still think we should optimize for the more common case, which is communicating across timezones.
This wouldn't solve much of the communicating across timezones problem - although you may no longer have to look up the canonical time, you instead have to look up the solar time or local time convention (are they sleeping? are they at work?)
So, it's better to keep the second problem ('what time is morning?') more accessible, since you need that in both cases.
The current use of timezones seems primarily designed to ease adjustment for those traveling between them. Work starts at 9 AM in region-X, you move to region-Y, adjust your time and work starts at the "same" time.
Today I think however there are a lot more cases of cross-timezone communications, and a lot of people are telecommuting to work and various events. It may be time to move on and adjust to better support distance communication and telecommuting.
Bad idea. You would still have different people in different places experiencing different parts of their day, even if you put them all on UTC or had no clocks at all. You still have to figure out what they are doing before you call and figure out whether it is too late to call, or too early, or they ought to still be in the office, etc., one way or another.
So what do you optimize for? For the ability to live your life anywhere you go with the same basic assumptions you and everyone else grew up with about when people wake up, are at work, eat, etc., or do you optimize for the convenience of the occasional synchronization of multi-locale events?
If your wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 1800, are you too late for breakfast? Are you too early to call someone you came to visit? The fact that you didn't have to reset your watch for the local time means you know exactly what's going on back in the place you left. Great. Too bad you don't have any idea what's going on where you actually are. You can save yourself the trouble of setting your watch, and be confused about when to do what all day long, or you can set your watch once and be completely oriented to your new locale by lifelong instinct.
Given the choice of having to do a clock calculation to synchronize occasional events versus having to get used to a different daily life pattern everywhere you live, visit, or even call, I'll take the former.
Use UTC for synchronizing events. Use local time for living life.
> You still have to figure out what they are doing before you call
To me, something like “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 2100 (or at 2000 in winter)” seems less complex than “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 8:00, which is 2100 (or 2000 in winter)”.
> If your wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 1800, are you too late for breakfast?
If you wake up, jet lagged, look at your watch, and it says 18:00—which place this time refers to?
I think having global time would be simpler (though it's impossible anyway due to politics and people's inertia).
...seems less complex than “in Japan, people usually start their workday at 8:00, which is 2100 (or 2000 in winter)”.
That's not how calls to Japan currently work, and I make plenty of them. You check the world clocks on your phone and see that it's 6:00am in Tokyo. You know what 6:00am means: it means what it has always meant for you and everyone else, everywhere in the world, since you and they were born. You decide to give them a call later. The end.
Life in different places on the globe is not synchronized just because you assign everyone the same universal clock time. You can either look up the local time in Japan, and know immediately what that means, or you can look up your clock time here, know immediately the clock time in Japan, and still not know what you need to figure out: what's going on right now in Japan. You still have to look that up somehow, but the answer won't be a simple local time that everyone understands intuitively, because local time maps differently to the daily cycle of life in every locale.
I think having global time would be simpler
Well, everyone's watches would say the same thing. That's the good news. The bad news is that they would all mean something different.
though it's impossible anyway due to politics and people's inertia
The inertia of things that work well in practice is a valuable shield against seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time theories. I find UTC very useful for viewing astronomical events. When I need it, it's just another clock. It doesn't mean it needs to replace the far more useful local time for daily life.
You are misunderstanding how it would work. People would still be awake when it's light out and asleep when it's dark.
Instead of everywhere starting their workday at 9am UTC like you're imagining, London would start their workday at 9am UTC, New York would start their workday at 4am UTC, Los Angeles would start their workday at 1am UTC.
Actually, that's exactly how I know it would work. I'm pointing out the information your going to loose without having timezones because people are still going to get up and go to sleep basically following a solar day. Are people in Paris awake at 9:00 or asleep? Are people in LA working or not? Without a table, say a table that says what time of day it is in particular zones, 9:00 tells you nothing.
Nit: If we eradicate timezones, lets also get rid of this am/pm nonsense. New York wouldn't start at 1am, they would start at 1h00 (or 01:00, or 01h00, or however you want to notate it).
Not really. Two places with the same timezone may have completely different day and night schedules. The northen hemisphere is flooded with sunlight during Northen summer, while the souther hemisphere gets very little sunlight during this time.
Extend the issue out, when I want to call my mother around the world, how do I know she's not ill today, took the day off and went to bed early?
You're creating an issue by extending something to absurdity.
Specifics like that aren't going to be communicated with any system, but removing timezones removes the general idea that is communicated with 9am or 7pm.
Siesta is an essential part of daily schedule in many places. “Took the day off”, “ill”, “went to bed early” are obviously extraordinary circumstances.
Because instead of just remembering that Spanish people siesta from 1200-1400 local time, you might as well translate it to UTC and make it even more complicated to remember?
It is possible that it appears complicated because it is not common to use UTC. But let's try to imagine the scenario further...
So Spanish people typically siesta between 1100 to 1300 UTC. Imagine, my home country is UK. I work between 0900 to 1800 UTC. Imagine I travel to US and need to call my Spanish friend. In the US, when I reach the east-coast I realize that I work between 0200 to 1100 UTC. At once I can deduce when to call my Spanish friend; it is before I leave my work at 1100 UTC.
Frankly, even I had not thought through completely the UTC based scenario, until now. I am now even more convinced that it's the most convenient way forward.
When does your Argentine friend siesta? When does your Japanese friend get off work? What's a good time to phone your friend in Australia? You've just landed in Tokyo--when should you be getting to sleep? You still have to do time zone calculations, but you don't have the time zones anymore.
The place where this scheme falls down is that for many people the date (and day!) will change some time during the day. How strange that it be Wednesday before lunch and Thursday afterward.
Also for communication you still need to keep a table of when the sun rises and sets in each place; still need to keep in mind "they're x hours ahead/behind."
I travel extensively and work regularly with people in every time zone, and have thought long and hard about this problem. I don't think abandoning time zones is the solution, but abandoning DST globally would certainly help a lot.
Because UTC already exists and is already widely used, and compatible with all existing hardware and software. Rather than commercial Swatch time, I'd prefer French revolutionary time as a decimal time system anyway - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#France
In most cases you're not dealing with people in different time zones. You're dealing with people in the same time zone. With time zones I can figure that wherever I go, daylight is roughly between 7 AM and 5 PM depending on latitude and season, breakfast is eaten in the morning, the midday meal is eaten around noon, the evening meal is eaten around 6-8 PM, offices are open from 9-5, shops are open until around 8-10 PM unless they're 24 hours, people go out for drinks after work between 5 and 7 PM and out clubbing between 10 PM and 2 AM depending on local custom, it's considered impolite to call someone on the phone after 10 PM, and a million other small facts. I live in Seattle now, but if I lived in Boston next week, I wouldn't have to learn all these things over again, at least not to as severe a degree. And if I want to call my friend in Boston, I just have to add three hours to figure out whether it's later than 10 PM Eastern. Any other means of solving the problem would probably be equivalent to using time zones, just more complicated--"well, on the West Coast it's a little late to be calling people on the phone at 0600, and the East Coast experiences local noon at 1700 rather than 2000 for a difference of 3 hours, so 0300 is a little late to call someone on the East Coast".
But there is a very good reason why 12:00 should be midday, it's the mid of the day where the sun is highest in the sky. Actually this fact was enough reason for me to switch my timezone to that of a country on my longitude where there's no DST.
I understand the reason for abolishing DST, but that's not the same as abolishing localtime and timezones all together.
While this is true, every locale in West China essentially runs on "pirate" time, which is adjusted as if it was in its own timezone. So yes, trains and planes are scheduled and run on Beijing time, but everyone else adjusts the time to something that makes sense.
There's no reason 1200 should be midday. If we changed this today the next generation would never stop to think about how "weird it is that it's dark at 1200" where they live.