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This is a step back to the bad old days when every town had its own definition of noon. Communication and anything that required scheduling was a mess because
by nostromo 4y ago
This is a step back to the bad old days when every town had its own definition of noon. Communication and anything that required scheduling was a mess because there were too many local definitions of time.
- dredmorbius 4y agoSpecifically: telegraph and railroads killed local time. Until then, things happened far enough apart, and sufficiently loosely coupled (shipping or riders on horseback being the principle means of long-distance travel) that coordination at a finer grain than a few minutes (and quite often hours or days) was unnecessary. Financial transactions are now precise to the microsecond, amongst other processes. Scientific / measurement precision can be far higher still.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> step back to the bad old days when every town had its own definition of noon It worked until there were tens of thousands of towns. Even then, we didn’t port Greenwich time to Alabama; we aggregated the commonsense approach. We could inhabit every planet and solid moon in the system and not come close to they breaking point.
- dredmorbius 4y agoFar less the number of towns than the amount and precision of interactions amongst them.