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?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

Two questions being asked here: 1. Why *are* things this way? and 2. Why might we want to *keep* things this way? I’m not sure about the historical context leading to the first answer, but I can come up with some ideas for the second answer:

– Right now, statements like “need to wake up at 5:00” are culturally unambiguous, because everybody in the world understands how awful it is to wake up at 5:00. Changing that will make it more difficult to communicate time information relative to your day/night cycle. (Though admittedly a weak point, since “after 5 hours of sleep” works just as well)

– In a legal context, it’s possibly easier to formalize “citizens must remain silent from 22:00 to 5:00” rather than having to go with some awkward description like “from -2 hours to +5 hours *relative to midnight*”, which is technically just what “22:00” and “5:00” already mean anyways.

– With a fixed time zone, DST would translate to needing to adjust all your memorized times, i.e. your meeting is now always at 3:00 instead of 2:00 – having locally shifting timezones allows you to keep the same times in your head even as the mapping from time to day changes. If you want to preserve this property you’ll still have weird +/-1 hour differences, which somewhat defeats the point.

– In most contexts where it matters (international trade, technology, etc.), people already use UTC as this universal source of constant time. But most things that depend on the time (i.e. primarily local events) aren’t really burdened by timezones existing.

– Changing things now would be a massive disruption to the entire ecosystem, people’s habits, etc. – look at how long it’s taking to standardize units of measurement across countries, to get a sense of how difficult it would be to standardize the units of time.

All in all it seems like an idea with some neat fringe benefits for frequent international travelers / collaborators, but probably relatively inconsequential to our everyday life and doubtfully worth the effort of disruption.