4 ms·
> Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at dif
by clnq 4y ago
> Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night.
A very interesting idea, but probably much too progressive.
- soggybutter 4y agoI've wanted to do this for years. Every time I mention this to someone I get a surprisingly visceral reaction against it even when they can't think of any real reasons why this would be bad.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI absolutely do not believe that nobody has given you a coherent list of reasons.
- soggybutter 4y agoI didn't say no one ever has, just that there's a very strong negative reaction even when they don't have reasoning for it
- Dylan16807 4y agoDo they really not have a reason or do they not want to put in 15 minutes of effort to explain something that has already been explained a thousand times?
- amflare 4y agoI mean, if chaos is the goal, then sure... Let me refer you to: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- schlowmo 4y ago> Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically. I believe I just fell in love with that idea. If this would become a social norm people would maybe stop trying to reach me in the morning. And I would know if it's too late to call others.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoThis can indeed happen when a significant portion of humanity lives in the space, and can trigger the biggest change to how we keep date and time.
- unilynx 4y agoNo need to wait that long - plenty of incoming email has "My working days are: " in their footer. I'm sure time can be added there too
- micah94 4y agoI'm for this. Get rid of timezones, AM, PM, DST, leap years, seconds, all of it! Imagine having to know just one time. It takes a bit to wrap your head around. But only because we've accepted all the confusion for so long. The sun is still going to be "up" in one part of the world and "down" in another. The little numbers on your clock don't change that. Why can't it be the same little numbers everywhere?
- magnio 4y agoHow do you know whether the sun is up or down in a place when all places have the same time?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- clnq 4y agoI see people bringing this question up as a counter-argument for a unified time. But how do you know whether the sun is up or down in any given place on Earth right now? You probably don't, if the place is a few thousand miles East or West from where you are. You'd have to look up its time zone. And doing that might not be that much different from looking up at what hour the solar noon is somewhere else.
- School-Cotton 4y agoYou could do that, sure. Whenever I want to schedule a meeting with someone in Zurich, I could reason “15:00 UTC is about an hour before solar noon for me and — looking it up — about four hours past for him. Reasonable time for a meeting.” This would prove so useful in practice that people would rapidly start referring to times that way when talking to people from abroad: “sorry I couldn’t take your call, it was seven hours past solar noon for me; I was having dinner.” Everyone would memorize their location’s offset from UTC and use it colloquially all the time. Oh wait, we’ve reinvented time zones! Basically, the point of time measured in hours and minutes is to be useful to humans in daily life. And it’s useful to have a common language for things relevant to humans.
- mr_toad 4y agoAnd measure time in powers of ten while we’re at it. None of this 24 x 60 x 60 nonsense.