3 ms·

Devil’s advocate: why don’t we all just use UTC? Get rid of time zones, those are only a human conveniences as well...

• BerislavLopac 9y ago
  Possibly something to do with "we all" being mostly human... ;-)
• salvar 9y ago
  Well, human conveniences tend to be convenient to humans. So I guess that's why we don't get rid of timezones.
• tzs 9y ago
  Universal UTC does not change the need people have to know how approximate solar time locally maps to approximate solar time at some different longitude. E.g., you are in Munich and want to call your friend in Tokyo. You want to call him at a time that is not too early in the morning for him, or not too late in the evening for him. Let's say you want to call him at lunch time, which you both take around solar noon. Under the current system, where the time in each time zone approximates local solar time, that means he takes lunch around the same clock time you do, which is 12:00. The question you ask yourself is "When his clock says 12:00, what does my clock say?". You answer that by subtracting the time zone difference (which is 8 hours), so you get that you should call him when you clock says 4:00. Now let's do this with universal UTC. Your clocks no longer approximate local solar time. Solar noon is around 11:00 clock time at your place. The question you want to ask now is "What time is his solar noon?". Since his solar time is approximately 8 hours ahead of your solar time, you answer it exactly the same way. You subtract 8 hours from the time from the UTC time you have lunch to get the UTC time he has lunch, so 3:00. As long as people keep their activities lined up with approximate local solar time and people need to sync things with people whose solar time is significantly different than theirs, we need something like time zones.