Resolved: time zones, leap years, leap seconds, and solar timekeeping should be abolished

Great Debates
21

I don’t see how, unless you want to redefine “year” as something other than one revolution around the sun and “day” as something other than one rotation of the planet. I think the idea of letting or time bases drift away from the cycles we find meaningful and useful to us is rather counterproductive.

I never thought of that. But then I was never onboard with this whole concept to begin with. It seems like it’s only for the convenience of programmers, well boo hoo. I’m not even sure that it would help them all that much. There’s plenty of things we do that are tied to place and the time of day relative to the position of the sun, and with everyone on the same clock you’d still need a relative time zone or GPS coordinates and a way to define “this is the operating time I want to be in”. For something as simple as opening hours for a nationwide business, you can’t say 9-5 anymore. It’d be 900-1700 in this arbitrarily defined zone, 1000-1800 in this other arbitrarily defined zone, etc. Say you’re putting together a kitchen schedule for all your restaurants. It’s no longer possible to say “start prepping breakfast at 5am for opening at 7am” or whatever, because those times are now different depending on the location. For every problem this solves I suspect there’s a new problem that it introduces.

Trivial to change perhaps, but I’d argue there’s more mental processing required. Not so much from an email signature or corporate website standpoint, but from a “figuring it out” standpoint. Right now if you need to contact someone across the world, all you really need to ask is “what time is it there now”? That’s easily retrievable, and you can make a note of “they’re X hours behind/ahead of us”. Under the proposed system, you instead need to ask “what are the standard business hours there” or “what is the equivalent standard 9-5 time block there”?

Point being, for many practical uses, you end up falling back to some sort of time zone.

22

That would still need to happen. We don’t keep time just to tell people when to wake up and go to work. We have a very interconnected world that needs to be synchronized.

The bit that faces the public to tell us what time it is is a tiny fraction of that effort, and the modifications it has to change that time are even smaller.

The effort that individuals, businesses, and institutions will have to go to to adjusting to constantly changing schedules will be significantly bigger.

Right now, I have a clock in the sky. I can tell that most businesses will be open, since the sun is pretty high up. I don’t need to check online to see how they line up with that timekeeping piece.

Some jobs are better suited for times when there is daylight. For but one of many examples, construction is a lot harder when it is dark, and requires more resources.

I’ll provisionally agree that maybe less than 10% of businesses have the exact 9-5 hours. But I would say that 90%+ of businesses are open during those hours.

This is a good point. It is reasonable to expect that calling someone between 10AM and 8PM their time is acceptable. However, if everyone is on their own work schedules, you have no way of knowing when someone will be awake.

Right, most people have built in clocks that correspond with the time of day. They are alert during the day, and sleepy at night. Unless we are talking about removing the sun entirely from the equation, with everyone living inside and rarely venturing out, most people will keep active hours that line up with the daylight hours.

The only place that Earth time gets wonky is Mars. Every other celestial body has a day that is so far away from Earth time that people will not adapt to it. And even on Mars, they will probably be spending most of their time underground, so the day length is going to be a more academic concern than a practical one.

While not tied to a celestial time, any outposts will probably keep to the time that Earth uses. If nothing else, it will be a long, long time before Earth doesn’t represent 99+% of humanity’s population.

How do you know their sleeping hours? If we have gone off the day cycle to determine when things are open, when people go to jobs, then they could be awake at any time at all, and there is no way of knowing unless they publish their schedule.

But, in the current system, whether it is light or dark outside gives you a very high probability of knowing if the business is open or not.

I really don’t see the upside here. You are talking about maybe saving a tiny amount of computing power in adding or subtracting a few seconds or a day here and there, while asking people to completely change everything about how they go about their daily routine.

OTOH, daylight savings time, I’m on board with eliminating that.

23

I say we start with something simple
13 months, each with 4 weeks and one extra day belonging to no month (two in a leap year).

24

If you thought the standard time vs. saving time debate was heated, wait until we have to decide which season gets an extra month.

25

The months already don’t line up with the seasons. Which season is March?

26

@HMS_Irruncible

There already is atomic time (not just “the ability” to have it)—since the 1970’s. So perhaps you are seeing a problem that has already been solved?

Having an accurate time standard in no way negates the necessity of astronomical observations (it facilitates them, of course) or any of the complicated metrological/synchronizational protocols necessary to define a usable atomic time standard. So if you imagine some procedures can be simplified at their essence, that is an illusion.

If you are worried (a few thousand years too early?) about there not being precisely 24 strictly-defined hours in a day, I do not know that this is a huge issue, since there are multiple valid solutions to this so-called problem, and, significantly, the length of the day changes gradually, though it is an interesting thought experiment how to arrange things if, starting tomorrow, the day happened to be 28 (SI) hours long. (Again, this is so far into the future that it is not worth worrying about current human culture or circadian rhythms.)

If this is about business hours, I can tell you that e.g. the little shop across the street closes whenever they feel like it, posted hours notwithstanding, and they are definitely not going to open in the middle of the night even if the civil clock is set to 12 noon.

27

Here in Chicago, March 2023 has been Winter on odd days and Spring on even.

I took the 13-month suggestion to be a joke, but apologize for the hijack if it was meant sincerely.

28

See, this is why we need to just enclose the entire planet in a sphere, with solar cells on the outside and LED lights on the inside. Then just turn all the lights on and off at the same time, so it’s the same time everywhere in the world. Why are we just accepting the tyranny of a Sun that’s only visible from one side of the planet half the day?!?

You people think too small!

29

I am just boggled at the number of people who misinterpret the idea in this way.

No, of course I’m not suggesting that anyone get up and go to work in the middle of the night (unless they were already night shift). I expect that there will still be a sunrise roughly every 24 hours and that people will go to work/school roughly around that time. It’s just that the hour you now know as 7AM would be called a different hour depending on where you live.

30

And will be different in the future, since it will drift over time.

I’m still not seeing any upside here.

The only benefit you have stated is the claim that we spend a lot of time keeping our clocks synchronized with the rotation and orbit of Earth, and that we would no longer have to do that.

That seems like a pretty tiny effort. We spend a great deal of time ensuring that clocks around the world and in orbit are synchronized to eachother, and that’s not something that would change with your system. The effort that goes in to adding or subtracting a second or a day here and there is insignificant and are almost entirely automated.

Do you anticipate any other benefits other than saving the computers a few milliseconds work of work a year?

31

Do you really think that having every local business, government, school district, club, sports league, TV and radio station having to periodically adjust their hours, and communicate that info to everyone who needs it, would be less time, effort, and expense than what we’re doing now?

32

Personally, I don’t make ANY effort to make sure the spinny dials match the sun. I mean, there are people who do make an effort, but they’d have to make that effort regardless as someone needs to keep the official clock going accurately.

WRT time zones, I’d argue they’re MORE important today with instant worldwide communication. If I want to talk to someone in Cairo, I can look up the time in Cairo (20:48) and have a good idea what that means in terms of whether they will be awake to respond. In this new system there’s nothing to look up, it’s 18:48 everywhere. What do I look up to tell me it’s late evening in Cairo?

33

It’s a little bit unclear to me what you are proposing - are you suggesting that we not only come up with a universal time zone, but also a universal calendar? And that you would want universal time to drift relative to the position of the sun in the sky, just so that we wouldn’t have to deal with leap years? Not going to lie, it sounds like a lot more bother to have to recalibrate your notion of what time of day a particular timestamp means, than to add in an extra day into the calendar every so often. Sure, it can be easy enough to calibrate one time to know that noon (ie. when the sun is highest) is 18:00 where you are now, but what time will noon be on this day in 3 years time? Plus every time you travel to a new time zone you’ll have to recalibrate your sense of time again. Seems like it puts a significantly greater mental burden on people traveling.

It may be the case that once this system is in place for a long time, people would adapt to it well, but I think it would be a difficult transition. I’ve read that there is one culture of people where they only speak and think of directions in cardinal terms as opposed to relative to their current orientation - eg. they would only know how to say “look north” or “look south” instead of “look right” or “look left” - I think trying to make everyone adapt to that system would be similar in difficulty to trying to get everyone to adapt to a universal, shifting time zone.

34

Well, I’m fine with the 24 hour clock, every device I have which gives the option is always set to it. I also think months with different numbers of days is just silly.

But I do think that humans are diurnal and until most of us are on starships and space stations, or never physically move around on the planet, having a local time and a zulu time is desirable.

It could certainly be cleaned up, though.

35

The official international definition of meteorological seasons says northern hemisphere spring is 1st of March to 31st of May. That’s also southern hemisphere fall. The official international definition of astronomical seasons runs solstice to equinox to solstice etc., so Mar is ~2/3rds in winter and ~1/3rd in spring.

The official definition of major league baseball season in 2023 is Mar 30th to Nov 4th (if the World Series goes to all 7 games). But MLB “Spring training” first played a game on Feb 24 during meteorological winter. :slight_smile:

It all gets a lot messier than that quickie gloss once you look under the hood:

36

I think the suggestion is to de-couple our view of certain times from our daily routine. Think of the hours as A O’clock, and B O’clock, through Y O’clock.

I might think of B O’clock as evening, and someone in Tokyo thinks of it as morning. If I take a plane from LA at F:30. I might arrive in New York at J:45. No need to reset your watch.

We have no association between H o’clock and anything else, so we are happy opening our business at the time that makes sense for our “sun zone.” (We’ve eliminated time zones)

Once we accept the concept, we can put numbers back in for the letters.

37

No, I get that, I just think that as long as people are moving around to, or dealing with people in, other ‘sun zones’ then it’ll be easier to continue to think in local time for some activities. People are most active and businesses are most open during their sun times, I’d rather reset my watch to local than have to recalibrate my brain to ‘business hours start at 2300 in this town and 0200 in this town and 0600 in this town.’

38

And if you wanted to, it’s not that hard to change most phones and watches to display UTC rather than the local time. That’s 90% of the OP’s proposal.

The other 10% is eliminating the periodic changes we make to keep our clocks and calendars synchronized to the rotation and orbit of the Earth. While I don’t see the benefit of either proposal, I think even less of the latter one.

I’ve read through the thread, but I may have missed it. Has the OP stated any benefits other than saving some computers a tiny amount of work?

39

We should all use Unix time like God intended.

40

I think the first step here is to get the flat-earthers to have the sun go up/down all around the flat earth at the same time instead of all this hokey pokey it does now to simulate a globe thats spinning while orbiting the light source.

we fix that - the rest is easy.