why do we have different time zones instead of everyone being at the same current time and simply doing things at different hours of the day?

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Wouldn’t this prevent things like a country above another country (aka being in the same latitude) and having a different time zone (which never made sense to me); and other things that just don’t make sense in the current system?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

If you have time zones varying with longitude, then the time is basically telling you “where is the sun in the sky right now”

Imagine you’re going on a long plane or train journey, travelling across multiple time zones. When you get off, you want to know if the shops will still be open, if it’ll be dark out, when you should start thinking about finding some food, that kind of thing. With time zones, this is easy. Your pilot tells you what the local time is, or you look for a clock when you get off, or your phone tells you, and now you have a pretty good idea of all of that stuff.

Without time zones, you know it’s 3 PM, but you have no idea what that means. Maybe you can take a guess based on how far away it is, but still; you don’t know if it’s light or dark out, how many people will be out on the streets, whether anything will be open.

And every time you travel you have to keep mentally adjusting to remind yourself _3 PM doesn’t mean mid afternoon here, it’s late evening_, which would be quite confusing, particularly if you travel a lot.

Or even simple things, like reading a news story and it says “the crime happened at 10 AM” but it’s in a distant country so you have no idea what that means.

Or you’re trying to schedule a meeting with people across what would currently be multiple time zones. Since the time zone is the same for everyone, you have to awkwardly ask everyone what times they’d be awake for rather than just looking at their time zone and immediately being able to work out something that makes sense for everyone.

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