For centuries humans have marked time using day and night as a benchmark. We have marked days, using the movement of earth (with its tilted axis) around the sun, as days grow shorter or longer due to the degree of tilt and the oblong orbit bringing us closer or further from the sun, creating semi-predictable climate changes throughout the course of what we call a “year”. Although much of the world now uses the Gregorian Calendar with its 52 weeks of 7 days each, there are still around 47 other calendars in use today!
In addition to keeping track of “days” of a “year”, we have broken each complete cycle of day and night down to approximately 24 hours, and each hour down to 60 minutes, with one minute consisting of 60 seconds each. Then each area around the world has a different time zone, which attempts to match up with the varying hours of sunrise and sunset each day. Many of these zones adjust their clocks by one hour twice each year in order to account for the shortening and lengthening duration of the days as the seasons change from summer to winter. This is known as daylight savings time, the development of which is quite a story in itself.
The reason we humans do all this complicated dividing and labeling of an invisible, indefinable resource is that we wish to have some way to easily coordinate with each other, as well as somewhat accurately predict the future. We set time aside as a measurable commodity, when in fact it is non-existent in itself, so far as we can determine.
Being that calendars and time-keeping systems are just made up rules, why don’t we change them and simplify them even further? Imagine one world time. So 1:00 is 1:00 everywhere around the globe at once. This means that 1:00 is divorced from day or night, it is simply that, a numeric designation of a 24 hour clock-time that applies anywhere in the world at the same instant. Imagine how much easier it would be to schedule an appointment with someone on the other side of the globe, or really anywhere in the world.
“I’m available from 19:00 to 2:00,” someone might say. Or, “sunrise in my area is 00:27, and in your area it is 9:10.” Or, “I sleep from 2:00 and wake at 9:00, then I work from 12:00 until 20:00.” Sunrise and sunset times vary across the span of a year anyway, so it makes much more sense to live by an arbitrary clock time that is the same for everyone everywhere, as it does to live by an arbitrary clock time that is different everywhere.
I vote for One World Time.
Bonus: The history of time on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
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Question Your Reality Episode 1
Aired Wednesday, September 25th, 2013
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