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Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
(programming.dev)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Because despite all of our modern technology we are still very much bound to the cycle of night and day. Right now if someone says 'Hey let's meet online at noon' you have to ask what time zone they're in and do a little dead-simple math to figure out what time that is for you. Oh you're EST and I'm MST, noon for them is 10am for you. Not particularly hard, but a little irritating. On a system like you suggest you wouldn't have to do a little addition/subtraction to figure out what time it would be for you, you instead have to do some more complex math based on when the sun comes up for you and figure out if you'll even be awake at that time. You're hosting a meeting on west-coast US time and one of the people in that meeting and they're on the east coast of Australia. Noon your time and noon their time is the same, but for them noon happens at what might otherwise be in the middle of the night, so they'll definitely be asleep.
Really this is the simplest version because we all still mostly wake and sleep with the sun.
Why calculate?
While 1200 might be noon for one, another might just get used to 0800 to be noon. Who says 0000 must be midnight and 1200 noon?
If I am set to arrive in Bejing at 18:00 UTC that gives me 0 useful information without calculation.
Knowing that I will arrive at 2am local time is much more useful, it tells me it'll be dark and most shops won't be open.
You just recreated time zones
Aside from the fact that that's just timezones with extra steps?
Thousands of generations of human history/prehistory? We are used to being awake during the day because we use vision so much for everything we do, so we sleep when it's dark.
Why even decide what is noon? Sam works from 1600 to 0000, so when we want to have a meeting with Sam we just take in consideration of that time range, screw letting the sun dictate how we live our lives. (This also makes it friendlier to nocturnal people)