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At what point will technology be sufficient for exact local time everywhere?
It’s a thought I’ve had mulling around for a while now. I’m wondering will a point ever come when we return to completely accurate local time; each village, town and city operating on a local time synced with the sunrise/sunset—noon truly means the solar noon—with technology as the interface.
Is it possible? would we even want it, would it matter? Do we have to wait for brain chips to make a time conversion seamless?
Whoo boy, do I have the article for you.
tl;dr It's technically impossible, and if it was, we wouldn't want it for a variety of reasons even with said technology.
Thanks for the article, very interesting read. Some of the details, while a bit facetious are intersting to read about. Like server racks needing different time keeping based of there location.
And I did not read anything that would discount time used by people, not trying get rid of UTC. For instance time given in UTC+Location. Computers are already on a different time format to people, counting in seconds, 308987 means nothing to me so what does it matter if the conversion is to some faraway large time zone, or set to the local time of my town.
My basic argument is; all of our communication to far away locations happens electronically, it's conceivable we could make all conversion completely seamless, everyone simply using their local time with the computers doing the work of keeping everyone in sync.
You keep focusing on computers, but what about the human factor? I already find it a pain in the ass converting the existing time zones that other people I know live in (plus their summer/daylight versions) to my own timezone, to ensure we're talking about the exact same relative time when arranging schedules/meetings. So why would I want even more of that headache when the system as it stands right now is perfectly adequate with very few drawbacks?
To me, having an easily understandable, human convertible and well established standard, to make sure we can accurately communicate the same relative time to one another across the globe, is way more important than making sure that when the sun is at its absolute zenith at my position that my local time is exactly 12:00. And if we had thousands or even "infinite" times zones to ensure that absolute accuracy, it would just make everything impossibly difficult to coordinate across any distance. And with how increasingly interconnected our world has become due to global telecommunications, that sounds awful.
No thanks... hard pass for me, at least until said "brain chip" you mentioned comes out to do all that converting automatically for us. ;)
I focus on computers because when you're face to face you don't need to convert because you're in the same time zone, unless of course you're taking about another time zone, but in this case you already say it's such a pain that it needs to be looked up anyway.
The time zone mismatch is detrimental to pretty much everyone living in an early (relative to workhours) sunrise. Have a longer response here. TLDR, economists found a 1 hour sunrise delay leads to ~ 1 more hour of sleep a week. This reflects a roughly 4.5% wage increase.
Why have we taken it upon ourselves to run all conversion manually? And by necessity established this bulky system that is only accurate to the few who happen to live in at the right longitude. I don't care what kind of email provider I'm sending to, or what country the websites server is in, It's all handled, why not let time conversion be the same?
Why shouldn't my computer convert my 16:00 meeting to UTC+1.4 and then on your end run a conversion your local time UTC-5.9 or whenever your noon or sunrise happen.
Tech has already done so much to improve the quality of life, I think this time zone nonsense is seriously lagging behind.
Replace the offsets in this sentence with "+1" and "-6", and read it again.
It doesn't lose meaning, imo - which suggests that the problem is not actually that timezones are discrete, but instead that computers are (still) not particularly great at adjusting times to suit us; if you're doing any kind of synchronisation across timezones, you still end up adding offsets by hand rather than the computer doing it for you.
Do I actually care if the sun rises half an hour earlier than the clock suggests? Or half an hour later? (Remember, this is in the worst case – most people won't experience an offset that large.) Would my life be noticeably improved if the sun was directly overhead at 12:00, rather than 12:30?
(There's an interesting sidenote here about strangely-shaped timezones; in parts of the world, the worse-case offset is more like 2 or 3 hours. Does that matter? Have you considered why they live with such an offset, rather than following the existing 1-hour timezones more closely?)
Do you never use a telephone to call people? Or use video-conferencing?
I used to work in a business where part of our IT team was situated in a country with a 5-hour time difference from where I was, and we did a lot of video-conferencing. Personal contact is what helps to build a good team.
Yes of course, but usually there is a written confirmation if it's date/time. And really looking to the future, I can see a phone understanding a spoken time and automatically translating it. A bit uncomfortable but it's the direction we are heading towards.
My first question is: why? What's the point of having the sun directly overhead at 12:00pm? What benefit is there in this?
As far as I can tell, we manage to live our lives quite well with the sun shifting its noon-time position from day to day, month to month, and season to season. How would our lives be better if the Sun hit its high point at exactly noon every day?
By the way... the Sun's zenith point changes over the year anyway, by as much as 10 minutes. To confirm this, I did some research with a handy sun calculator I found. Picking Greenwich as my reference point, I found that the Sun reaches its high point at:
* Adjusted for Daylight Saving.
So, a completely accurate local time where noon truly means the solar noon would mean adjusting the local clocks every single day to adjust to the Sun's ever-changing zenith. I assume you don't intend that.
You would just use a standard local noon: pick one day of the year, and designate that day as your reference point for local noon, with solar noon varying every other day of the year.
But that's just a detail. There's still my original question: why is this a desirable thing to do? What's the benefit?
What's in it for me? :)
As an example from a freakanomics podcast about this: Huntsville, Alabama, and Amarillo, Texas are both in the same time zone on very similar latitude -- so the same amount of sunlight in a day. Yet their sunsets are a 1 hour apart.
You're right I'm not interesting in the minutia of an exact solar timing here. Just such a wide gap seems nonsensical, Spain and eastern Europe share the same time zone, but in western Spain sunrise happens at 8:14 and in Albania at 5:14, again similar latitude. That's nuts! No wonder the Spanish are known for staying up late, their sunset happens so much later.
Anyway back to the Freacnomics podcast; Gibson and Shrader discuss their paper, I'll just quickly paraphrase but you can read the transcript of the interview at the first link.
They found an earlier sunset nets more sleep. Also more sleep corresponds to a wage increase.
1 hour earlier sunset times in Huntsville, when compared to Amarillo corresponds to around 1 more hour of sleep a week, this extra hour is roughly equivalent to a 4.5% wage increase.
Surely at some point in the next 100.. 200? years, our technology will be sufficient to overcome any conversion problem that everyone can benefit from being synchronises with the sun.
So it's not about solar noon, it's about sunset.
I can see a case for time zones that are only 30 minutes wide. We just double the number of time zones from 24 to 48. We already have some time zones that are offset by 30 minutes from their neighbours, so this would just be more of the same.
But a separate time zone for each town seems like overkill.
What happens in Summer, when the days are longer anyway? Not even counting extremes like the circumpolar regions, there are areas where days extend to 14 or 15 hours in Summer. That pushes sunset back by about your 1 hour figure, which causes so much sleeplessness and loss of income. Are you going to adjust your clock throughout the year so sunset remains at the same time every night (and sunrise just becomes ridiculously early)?
I mean aren't these the same?, in terms of time offset. I picked noon because it's between sunset and sunrise. Should have made the initial post clearer.
Yeah you're right. The 30 minute chunks seems most logical, as for summer time it would also have to be adjusted based of distance from equator, probably again in 30 minute chunks, varying from the equator to the poles, and throughout the year.
But kind of my point is the current system is complicated enough that most people already rely on an online converter/their phones to do it automatically. I felt this most keenly when on a road trip in Australia. Passing from WA to SA then NT, all different times and rules on summer time, but I did not notice it, with the phone automatically handling the conversion. So if we already rely on tech why not go all the way?
Only because you keep referring to locations on the same latitude. If you want to actually synchronize with sunrise/sunset, then you can't have hours be fixed length of time in the way we think of it. You could have a system that uses only longitude and has continuous time zones, but that ruins the convenience of the large groups that are time zones just so that those in certain latitudes can match the sun to fixed numbers (and even then, only during some parts of the year if you base it on a higher latitude).
If you accept that truly solar accurate time has hours that fluctuate in length depending on latitude, time of year, and even time of day, then you have Apparent Solar Time. We have had technology that can handle that for centuries.
Not if your concern is when it gets dark in the evening, and what time people go to bed.
Let's return to Greenwich. On the longest day of the year, 21st June, the sun rises at 04:42 and sets at 21:21 - a day length of about 16 hours and 40 minutes. On the shortest day of the year, 21st December, the sun rises at 08:02 and sets at 15:53 - a day length of about 7 hours and 40 minutes.
If we assume that the solar zenith happens at exactly halfway through the day, then sunset on the longest day happens 8 hours and 20 minutes after zenith, while sunset on the shortest day happens 3 hours and 50 minutes after zenith. If noon is set at the solar zenith, then sunset on the longest and shortest days will happen at 20:20 and 15:50 respectively.
If your concern is what time the sun sets, and how this affects people getting to sleep, then this variation in the times of sunset matters. It's important that, at one end of the year, the sun sets at 3:50pm and, at the other end of the year, it sets at 8:20pm. People will sleep earlier when the sun goes down before dinner, and sleep later when the sun is up well into the evening. So, if you want to fix that, you need to align the clock with sunset. Rather than having the solar zenith happen consistently at noon, why not have sunset happen consistently at, say, 7:00pm every night of the year? That means that bedtime will be consistent, and people will sleep better, and earn more money. That's your reason for changing the clock, after all.
So, we set the clock so that it aligns with sunset, and sunset happens at 19:00 every day. Meanwhile, because the length of the day varies across the year, the time of sunrise will similarly vary. Continuing to use Greenwich as our example: on 21st December, sunrise will happen at 11:20, while on 21st June, sunrise will happen at 02:20.
It depends what your goal is. You've used bedtime and sleep patterns as your justification for changing the way time zones work, but your proposed solution won't solve the problem you're presenting, because you're focussing on noon instead of sunset.
It would be like a continuous reverse daylight saving time. So then we would have not only the complication of different time offsets offsets for different local times, but also those offsets continually changing. Even locations at the same longitude wouldn't be on the same time.
What if instead of using local time, people started work at different times in different locations?
I couldn't agree more. Why not have a universal time and just have the whole world use it? I'm sure implementation would be a terrible issue at first, but long term that makes the most sense to me. Who cares if sunup is at 17:00 hours? Or the sun is directly overhead at 7:00? I assume we'd use a 24 hour clock as we associate AM and PM with morning and night.
We do have a universal time and it is used for a lot of things like server logs. Timezones are still useful, for example if I want to talk to someone on the otherside of the world I can see on slack what their local time is and know if they are likely to come online and when they are likely to leave.
Clocks adjust themselves with no user input needed. I would like to see something similar to this but instead of creating 100000 new timezones to have one per town I want to see rolling timezones so there is no bit jump between daylight savings time. Each day would just be slightly shifted so you never notice it.
I'd much rather have UTC everywhere. But that's probably because I'm a computer guy who regularly travels.
This. And, to make it extra juicy, use decimal time. Oh look! Its 05:64 already!
What's the upside? To get as many sunlight minutes as possible during waking hours?
Yes, it also just seems natural, I get that it would be incredibly inconvenient right now. But surly there will come a point between now and say the next 500 years when technology is sufficient to overcome this inconvenience.
You know, there might be a good reason to do it. But something tells me people will be lazy and just use some sort of standard time, just to make peoples lives easier. Obviously 500 years down the line is hard to judge because I cannot imagine what humanity will look like; I am thinking mainly 50 years down the line.