March 16, 2012
One Time Zone for the World?
Could we ever have just one time zone? Image courtesy of Flickr user The Stakhanovite Twins
As I sit down to write this post, it is 4:03 p.m. on Thursday, March 15. I’m about ready for my afternoon snack. The sun is already low in the sky. Soon, the workday will be over. I’m in Brooklyn, New York. Elsewhere, of course, it’s earlier or later, and people are doing other things. Australians might be eating breakfast or taking their morning shower. Californians are probably having lunch.
Two Johns Hopkins professors think they have come up with a more rational way to run the planet. Astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry and economist Steve Hanke argue that we should all adopt Greenwich Mean Time, also known as Universal Time. That would make it the same time everywhere, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky. So rather than writing at 4:03 p.m., I’d be writing at 20:03. Then I’d have dinner at 23:30, watch a little TV, and hit the sack around, oh, 3:00. When I awoke, it would be 11:00—not just in Brooklyn, but everywhere. “Everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every moment,” the academics write in the January issue of Globe Asia, which they say would facilitate conference calls and business transactions.
Some countries have already moved toward fewer time zones. Since 1949, China has had only a single time zone even though geographically the country spans five. In 2010, Russia abolished two of its time zones, dropping the number from 11 to nine. And Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has suggested he may prune more zones in the future. But jumping from 24 time zones to one would be a much larger leap. On some islands in the Pacific, the date would change with the sun high in the sky. People would wake up on Tuesday and go to bed on Wednesday.
Henry and Hanke also want to do away with the standard Gregorian calendar, which many countries have been using since the late 1500s. Under the new Henry-Hanke calendar, March 15—or any other day, for that matter—falls on the same day of the week, year in and year out. My birthday will always be on Wednesday. “Think about how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world and it becomes obvious that our calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits,” Henry said in a press release. The pair also argue that a more logical calendar would be a boon to business. In the new calendar, every quarter has exactly the same number of days, making financial calculations simpler.
Every calendar has one major challenge that it must overcome: Each Earth year is a little more than 365 days—it lasts 365.2422 days, to be exact. The Gregorian calendar makes up for additional hours by adding a leap day at the end of February roughly every four years. The Henry-Hanke calendar adds an extra week at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week would constitute its own mini-month.
Henry and Hanke emphasize the many benefits of adopting their calendar and Universal Time, but I wonder if they’ve thought about some of the drawbacks. For example, Dolly Parton’s hit song “9 to 5” would no longer be relevant. The new office workday, at least in Brooklyn, would start at 14 and end at 22. Doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
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Another problem is overseas communication timezones give a good indication of when people are awake.
i agree with the calendar. the universal time however..i’m not convinced. although we would all have the same time, people would not go to sleep and wake up in the same moments everywhere, they would just do it at different hours according to the sun’s position in “their” sky.. so it would be even more confusing than now – although it’s, say, 2pm everywhere, if you’re in europe you wouldn’t know if people in China are already sleeping, but you could have a clue if you knew that over there it’s 11pm..
This makes no sense whatsover. People will still be asking, what TIME is it? What part of the natural day is it?> Yes, we know it’s 21:30 in Moscow, same as here, but where in the natural day are they? Is the sun going down, are people going to sleep, is it lunch time? Saying it’s 21:30 tells you absolutely nothing about the angle of the sun and people’s activities! Isn’t that obvious? Unless, of course, everyone will still get up at around 0600 or 0700 like we do now. That would make it all perfectly clear. But are people really going to get up when the sun is high overhead, or leave for work in the middle of the night? Who gets to get up in what used to be called “morning”.
This is absurd! If it’s 7am in Moscow we know people are getting up and going to work!
I understand the concept and like any change, we would all get used over time (Pun intended). What I was wondering is why leave the International Date Line where it is, why not move it the the same line as Greenwich zero time line?
If birthdays were going to be on the same day every year, parents would be scrambling to somehow arrange for Saturday deliveries!
I wish they would do something to make time global.
I lost a birthday once flying across the Pacific. The plane flew so slow and it took so long that somewhere along the path and crossing the international date line my birthday disappeared.
It would not have bothered me except we always got our birthday off, but since that day did not exist in my timeline I could not.
Now that we are a Global community I think it’s in our best interest to have a single 24hr time zone, but i think if we are going to change global time system, we should increase the second to compensate the hour to compensate the day and make all the months equal days no leap years, so we get an equal cycle accurate to within milliseconds per year, instead of adding a extra day every 4 years (leap year) or as suggested extra week every 5 years(surely a mistake as it will be every 28 years)..
So what! if the next day starts somewhere on the planet at lunchtime..it’s a planetary timezone, we will all get use to it eventually.
Why bother with specifying time by o’clocks?!? Why not specify it by major city currently under the sun? Like, I eat breakfast at half past Sydney, lunch at Moscow, and dinner at half past Halifax. No matter what method is adopted, mental backflips of some sort are required.
Do these suggestions turn individuals into units of production? I see no benefit to me! I resent the notion that Earth should become some monolithic collective!
the article was VERY unclear. do these scientists believe that people in the mid pacific will be going to work at 8 every evening so that everyone around the world operates on clock time, or do they think people will operate on sun time regardless of the hour? This article was either poorly researched or poorly written. I expect better from Smithsonian.
Don, I think the idea is that people would still go about their business during daylight hours, but the clocks would change. The professors do suggest, however, that the banking industry might want to keep the same hours so that all banks are open at the same time. I can’t imagine that proposal would be very popular with bank employees.
I assume that the author simply posted this story a couple of weeks early, surely one for April 1st?
Sound like a fabulous idea, barely implementable.
I find both these ideas extremely stupid.
First off, regarding time, our bodies are tuned into current day-night flow, and current time (although not perfect, mind you) does reflect that.
And calendar, my god… It should, as it does now, follow astronomically significant points, not economical “viability”. New proposal is even more “wrong” than what we have at the moment. So, instead of adding one day every four years, we would have entire mini-month (December+) every five or six years (which one is it, btw?). How does that make it easier? What happens in that week? Say we get to December 31st and we enter this mini-month – what are the dates, how does it affect other dates? From economic point of view, imagine you need to develop long term strategy and planning for coming five years – would you know you have a mini-month somewhere in between? Not to mention costs of converting from current calendar to the new one.
This is just two guys desperately trying to be heard…
Nash, the mini month would happen every five or six years (sometimes five, sometimes six). Here’s an easy way to know which years would have the extra week: If the corresponding Gregorian year either starts on a Thursday, or ends on a Thursday, that year contains an extra week. “These years were chosen so as to keep the new calendar as close as could be to the cycle of the seasons,” write Henry and Hanke.
For everyone worried that they wouldn’t know what time a country wakes up and goes to work, do you know exactly what time it is in say China, or Russia, or Australia right now with out looking it up? It would take just as much effort to figure out what time it is in another country under our current system as it would to figure out what time people do things under the new system
It sounds like a fantastic idea, sure, a near to impossible implementation, but being able to know the exact time of other parts of the world without the need of making conversions would be marvelous. We are living in a global village, thinking of something like that is pretty much expected at this level, I hope they find a solution that works out for everyone.
Why do we have different time zones?