When I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan, we lived on GMT, called Zulu time in the military. (Each time zone is assigned a letter, and it is referred to by its phonetic name.) This was a base run by the Air Force. Since it is my only data point of an base in a war zone, I don’t know if that is standard in the Air Force. In the Navy, we just changed all of the clocks on the ship as we traversed each time zone, although operationally, we also used Zulu time.
It was really confusing that all of the base services were in Zulu time, but local time is Z +4:30. So lunch was at 1200 local, which was 0730 Zulu time. It was really confusing in the beginning, but we got used to it.
You’d get used to that too. Lots of people have the day change in the middle of a work period without it being a big deal.
The sun doesn’t set at the same time more than twice a year (and not even that often if you want to be nitpicky about it), and lots of people live in places where it does set at 1pm sometimes. This is not a “would not work” argument against universal time.
I’ll admit that I’m not familiar with Arctic cultures and crazy time zones. If the sun set around here at 1pm, the legislature would say to hell with all of this, and 1pm is now 7pm (or something similar). And would there be an all powerful world government that would tell us that we must call 7pm 1pm?
After he missed a train in Ireland!
The problem is not legal or governmental, but physical and geographical: If you’re so far north that sunset is at 1 pm, then sunrise will be around 11 am. Adding 6 hours to that won’t make anything better, and would probably make it all worse.
I call Woosh.
Sunrise, sunset times in December 2012 at Rankin Inlet, Nunavut.
In case this isn’t a woosh, as someone suggested, even in New York, NY day length varies with more than 5 hours between December and June. And the origin of the hypothetical world time is irrelevant when judging the validity of arguments against it being functional.
Our boat functions on UTC time, we change which day it is in “the middle” of our day. It’s not a big deal. I for one would love a global time that everyone used universally.
I wouldn’t call that particularly far North.
What a timely question ;), I was visiting the Greenwich Meridian only yesterday (really, I had family visiting me in London, and I took my 8 year old nieces to stand across the prime meridian in Greenwich and listen to some actor in a frock coat talk a lot about navigation).
The Prime Meridian was introduced (in various countries) to help seagoing navigation. The British version, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted across the country in the mid 19th century, due to the spread of the railways.
The Meridian line moved around, and there were multiple versions (such as a different one in Paris), until the International Meridian Conference of 1884, where international time zones were agreed (apart from in France, Brazil and the Dominican republic).
Interestingly, Greenwich itself (a suburb of London) is currently one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, as we are on British Summer Time.