End Daylight Savings Time … and more

 

Many things in life are inflicted upon us that are irritating, aggravating, and infuriating.  Taxes, of course, are an obvious example.  And then there's Daylight Savings Time (DST).  In 2022 we did the "spring forward" on March 20, and will do the "fall back" on November 6.  Twice a year we must all go through the tedious ritual of resetting all our clocks, both the physical ones and the internal ones inside our bodies.  And there's ample evidence out there that this semi-annual clock reset causes big-time sleep deprivation that harms us in many ways. 

sleep deprivation

One of the big reasons for implementing DST was that it supposedly saves energy.  That might have been valid decades ago when most lighting was done with energy-guzzling incandescent bulbs, but no more.  Today we all have electronic gizmos and appliances that run continuously.  Furthermore, it can be argued that DST causes MORE energy use, because the biggest electrical consumer of all is air conditioning, which probably gets run LONGER due to greater activity while the sun is up. 

And so, there is talk all around the nation to abolish DST.  Read about it here:  States Object to DST 

these guys LOVE Daylight Savings!

Granted, DST DOES have its advantages.  With that extra hour of daylight in the afternoon, we tend to be more active and get more stuff done.  And along those lines, there are a few niche businesses that actually profit from it, such as golf, barbecue, and home improvement suppliers.  They lobby the government heavily to maintain the status quo.  

One particularly silly proposal making the rounds is YEAR-ROUND DST.  The politicians and talking heads make it sound like they are waving a magic wand creating an extra hour of daylight for all out of thin air.  DST, of course, does nothing of the sort; it merely tricks us all into starting our day earlier, thereby "shifting" an hour of otherwise wasted daylight from early morning to late afternoon.  But, it only makes sense in the summertime.  DST in the wintertime is pure tomfoolery, for it would mean we start our workday or school-day in ice cold, pitch black pre-dawn darkness many hours before the sun rises. 

clock time controlled here

Another crummy aspect of year-round DST is that it makes the time displayed on our clocks very … arbitrary.  In ordinary Standard time, your clock is synchronized with the sun.  When your clock says 12:00 noon, that means the sun is at its highest point; when your clock says 6:00 am or 6:00 pm, that means the sun is rising or setting, respectively (calculated as yearly averages).  But permanent DST trashes that idea, and instead, makes clock time determined via politics.  And if politicians can decide what our clocks display, what's to prevent them from making it anything they want?  Why not double or triple DST (setting clocks two or three hours ahead of otherwise Standard Time)? 

Even if we continue the practice of semi-annually resetting our clocks, the DATES to do so are also terribly arbitrary.  Originally, those dates aligned with the spring and fall equinoxes.  But from whence came November 6?  That's six weeks after the fall equinox!  Answer:  it was yet another political compromise. 

The bottom line is:  whichever way we decide to manage our clocks, there are drawbacks.  Resetting them twice a year sucks bigtime, and the relevant dates become arbitrary.  Leaving them permanently on Standard Time will "waste" an hour of daylight every summer morning.  And permanent DST is ridiculously arbitrary and anyway doesn't work in the winter.  

Thus, I propose a radical idea that goes above and beyond all the forementioned ideas - hence the "… and more" in the title of this article:  I propose that we abolish time zones, and the whole planet simply adopts Universal Time (i.e. the time in Greenwich, England). 

Whoa, you're probably thinking:  That's nuts!  

Well, let's start at the beginning.  What is a time zone, and why do they exist?  

The purpose of time zones is to help "sync up" the sun with our clocks, a task complicated by the fact that the earth is round.  (Sorry, flat-earthers.)  So, no matter where you are on Earth, when your clock reads "noon", the sun is at its highest point.  And when the calendar does its daily flip from, say, "Monday" to "Tuesday", it happens in the middle of the night, when most of us are snug in our beds. 

Presently, the earth is divided into 24 time zones, each averaging 15° of longitude, which is about 1,037 miles at the equator.  There is no iron-clad rule that says that There Shalt Be 24 time zones; we could, in fact, divide the earth into any number of zones.  The more zones you have, then the more accurate the synchronization with the sun.  We could have a thousand time zones, and you could pinpoint the position of the sun with amazing accuracy!  But the more zones you have, then the more complicated life becomes, especially for anyone who travels.  Thus you have to find a "compromise" between celestial accuracy and societal convenience, and throughout the ages, having 15° wide zones has been a pretty good balance. 

Here is a time zone map.  (View it interactively at time zone map/) 

One thing you will notice is that NONE of the time zone boundaries run straight north-and-south all the way from pole-to-pole.  Rather, they zig and zag all over the place.  The folks who decide where the lines go try to avoid running these boundaries smack down the middle of populated areas.  They also follow political borders and other geographic features.  The closest one to "perfect" is the boundary between UT minus 9 and 10, hugging the border between Alaska and Canada; but even it makes a little jog to line up better with the borderline.  In the battle between accurate celestial synchronization versus societal convenience, the latter often wins. 

The United States, at about 3,000 miles wide from east to west, has four time zones.  You may be surprised to learn that these time zones were established by the railroads, not by the government. 

One particularly interesting anomaly on the time zone map is China.  The entire country, which is geographically as wide as the United States, is all one huge time zone!  You might say that China is an extreme example of where, evidently, nobody cared much about celestial synchronization. 

And so, what I propose here is that we take the concept of societal convenience to its ultimate conclusion, and reduce the number of global time zones from twenty-four to (wait for it …) ONE! 

farmer

First of all, how important is celestial synchronization?  The whole business of syncing up with the sun harkens back to an age when everybody was a farmer.  Today we live in an electronic, digital, inter-connected, global age of 24-7 activity, where ubiquitous lights have vanquished the darkness of night, and we routinely travel and communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime.  Converting dates and times to the appropriate zone is a pain and a nuisance.  Wouldn't airline travel be oh-so-much simpler if the departure and arrival date-times were ALWAYS in the same zone, regardless of where you are going?  Wouldn't it be oh-so-much simpler to schedule online meetings if EVERYONE'S calendar showed the same time, no matter where they were?  

Note also that, in a one-time-zone world, we wouldn't need the International Date Line (IDL) either.  The IDL is necessitated by the fact that "midnight", where some longitude is doing the daily calendar flip, is constantly on the move as the earth rotates.  The IDL makes some crazy gyrations in the southern Pacific so to keep some scattered island groups together.  So without an IDL, the whole planet can simultaneously be "Monday" or whatever.  Ship and airplane travelers could forget the whole messy complication. 

So you're probably thinking:  wait a doggone minute!  My workday normally starts at 8:00 am.  I live in Houston, Texas, which is Universal Time (UT) minus 5.  At my longitude, 8:00 UT occurs one hour after midnight.  In your one-time-zone world, would my normal workday start an hour after midnight?!? 

Um, no.  In a one-time-zone world, the sun still has influence over our lives.  Each longitude would have its own "custom" typical daily schedule, based on the sun.  Take a look at this chart:

Activity by Time Zone
				Go to Work	Lunch	Leave Work		Bed time			Daily calendar flip
	rel to sun:		dawn	2 hrs after dawn	noon	1 hr before dusk	dusk	4 hrs after dusk	mid- night
Zone/City	Offset
Greenwich, England	0		600	800	1200	1700	1800	2200	2400		midnight
Rio di Jeneiro, Brazil	-3		900	1100	1500	2000	2100	100	300		late evening
Miami, Florida	-4		1000	1200	1600	2100	2200	200	400		evening
Houston, Texas	-5		1100	1300	1700	2200	2300	300	500		early evening
Denver, Colorado	-6		1200	1400	1800	2300	2400	400	600		sunset
Los Angeles, California	-7		1300	1500	1900	2400	100	500	700		late afternoon
Anchorage, Alaska	-8		1400	1600	2000	100	200	600	800		mid-afternoon
Honolulu, Hawaii	-10		1600	1800	2200	300	400	800	1000		early afternoon
Aukland, New Zealand	12		1800	2000	2400	500	600	1000	1200		noon
Brisbane, Australia	10		2000	2200	200	700	800	1200	1400		late morning
Beijing, China	8		2200	2400	400	900	1000	1400	1600		mid-morning
Bangkok, Thailand	7		2300	100	500	1000	1100	1500	1700		after sunrise
Islamabob, Pakistan	5		100	300	700	1200	1300	1700	1900		before sunrise
Moscow, Russia	3		300	500	900	1400	1500	1900	2100		before sunrise
Cape Town, S. Africa	2		400	600	1000	1500	1600	2000	2200		after midnight
Paris, France	1		500	700	1100	1600	1700	2100	2300		after midnight

This chart depicts a typical, average, ordinary day for a citizen of Planet Earth, the things he/she does, and when.  All times are yearly averages, aka "equinox" times.   

get up, get dressed, go to work

Start with Greenwich, England (offset zero).  If you live there, we see that the sun rises at 0600, you go to work at 0800 (2 hours after dawn), eat lunch at noon, leave work at 1700 (an hour before dusk), the sun sets at 1800, you go to bed at 2200, and midnight is at 2400.  (Note that Universal Time is on a 24-hour clock with no "am" or "pm".)  We'll come back to the daily calendar flip later. 

Skip down to Houston, Texas (offset minus 5).  If you live there, in a one-time-zone world, you'd STILL go to work two hours after sunrise, eat lunch at noon, leave work an hour before sunset, etc, etc.  Your day is STILL synced up with sun; it's just that your watch will say "13:00" when you go to work, and "17:00" when you eat lunch, "22:00" when you leave work, and "3:00" when you go to bed, etc.  

If you lived in Beijing, China (UT plus 8) then your watch will say "24:00" when your workday starts, and "4:00" at lunchtime, and so on.  For any longitude, you have to know the "customs", and it's all based on the sun. 

The one aspect of a one-time-zone world that is somewhat (shall we say) quirky would be: the daily calendar flip.  Under our present, celestially synchronized, 24-time-zone world, we all flip our calendars from, say, "Monday" to "Tuesday" (or from "today" to "tomorrow") in the middle of the night when most everyone is asleep.  But in a one-time-zone world, only Greenwich's longitude would do the daily calendar flip at midnight.  For everyone else, UT 2400 will come at various odd times.  For our Houston native, "Monday" would become "Tuesday" in the early evening.  For our Beijing native, the daily calendar flip would occur mid-morning.  Quirky?  Yes, but you'd get used to it. 

So there you have it:  The ultimate proposal to simplify the lives and daily routines of everybody around the globe.  No, it doesn't solve the problem of the "wasted" hour of summer morning sunlight, but that's outweighed by numerous other advantages.  Let's do it, get rid of DST, and stop the politicians from mucking with our clocks.