Thread by @bopinion

Many people want to get rid of daylight savings — for good reason. But @andreaskluth wants to take things a step further: Let’s get rid of time zones altogether.

It’s a radical proposition, but let’s hear him out trib.al/rUCaREo

To see how arbitrary time zones are, let’s go on a jaunt through history.

For most of human evolution, we rose with the sun and then got drowsy at dusk, before sleeping soundly exactly when we should trib.al/rUCaREo

☀️In the mid-19th century, local time was still based on a sundial.

But railroads started carrying folks around and telegraphs magically connected them across continents. People needed standardized schedules to catch a train or get a message trib.al/rUCaREo

So, in 1884, international time zones were agreed upon. The prime meridian runs through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.

The rest of the world was divided into strips of 15º longitude in width, adding up to 24 zones, 1 for each hour of the day trib.al/rUCaREo

But, once the system was devised, politicians everywhere started messing with it:

🇫🇷The French for years refused to accept the British standard
🇺🇸In the decentralized U.S., time-keeping remained a free-for-all until 1918 trib.al/rUCaREo

Even now, nations bend the meridians to suit their ideologies:

🇰🇵North Korea shifted its time zone by 30 mins, because it could, before moving it back again
🇳🇵Nepal diverges by 15 mins
🇷🇺Russia has 11 time zones
🇨🇳China, which should have five, has one
trib.al/rUCaREo

Politics isn’t the only thing that exposes the system as intrinsically silly.

If you ever visit the right spot in Antarctica (where the meridians converge) and stretch out in your sleeping bag, you’ll be in all time zones simultaneously trib.al/rUCaREo

Besides being inane, the convention messes with our biological clocks.

People who live on the eastern edge of a time zone get their circadian rhythms, and health, thrown out of whack trib.al/rUCaREo

The whole notion of time zones rests on a fundamental delusion. It suggests that a number — 7, 12 or 21 — should tell us when to get up, eat lunch or go to bed.

We should instead be taking our orders from the interplay of the sun and circadian rhythm trib.al/rUCaREo

Hence we should transition to a simpler but superior system, combining:

🕰One global time
⏰Several billion individual and biological times trib.al/rUCaREo

The single global time is necessary in our truly global Zoom-and-Slack era.

Pilots, who’d rather not crash in the multinational airspace, already use Coordinated Universal Time or UTC -- the successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) trib.al/rUCaREo

Initially, having one global time would be weird, even hilarious.

New Yorkers would have to get used to having breakfast when the clock seems to say noon, Shanghainese when it shows midnight. But we’d quickly sort it out trib.al/rUCaREo

In the same way, after adopting UTC everywhere, we might also reconnect with natural time.

We’d start listening to our bodies again, and associate different numbers with dawn, noon, night and so forth trib.al/rUCaREo

It might even bring us some benefits, by forcing us to rethink conventions:

🌇School might start later to suit teen brains better
🌃Work should finish before dark so the blue light of our screens wouldn’t mess with our sleep
trib.al/rUCaREo

Making time in one sense absolute would be efficient in our global economy.

Leaving the interpretation of that number up to us could help re-synchronize us with natural light, aiding everything from digestion to sleep trib.al/rUCaREo