I had a interesting 'food for brain' kind of a conversation with my friend Dave Karp the other day.
The problem he posed to me was :
"Why do we have different time zones ? Why doesn't earth have just one single time ? ".
Let me elaborate. His idea was that the people of this planet should be able to freeup their brains from the notion of different time zones and time differences. They shouldn't have to ask a question such as "What time is it over there ?".
Basically what he was proposing was that everybody in the planet should follow one time. Period.
No time zones, and no time differences.
I am not sure if it was the food that had made us indulge in this kind of conversation but it was during our lunch break so I am pretty certain we were not drinking and even if we were, that's besides the point. Lets just talk about this radical idea for a minute. OK.
What if everybody on the planet had the same time? You call your mom in Indiana or uncle in kansas or boss in Bangkok they all have the same time. You dont ever have to ask the question "what time is it over there? " again.
Everybody's watch shows the same time.
The question of time is likely to come up only when say a Martian looks up and queries his wife "What time is it on earth honey ?"
If time zones were abolished, lets analyze this and ask some of the basic questions first.
Q. How would your day be organized in such a system ?
A. Well In this system, people wont try to organize chores around time but would rather assign time to their chores. Let me explain.
Lets assume London is still considered center of the world and gets to be the baseline for this new system. Lets call it DMT - Dave's Mean Time(Original eh ?) which means if you live in london your day will more or less be like we have it now. Wake up at 6, Get to work at 8, Lunch at noon, Get out of work at 5, Bed at 10 so on.
All other countries and cities now adjust themselves from this baseline but they dont adjust time like the current system instead they adjust their chore. That means New yorkers now wake up at 12:30 AM, go to work at 2:30 AM , Lunch at 6:30 AM , Get out of work at 11:30 AM, (yeh!) and be in bed at 5:00 PM. (This is assuming new yorkers conduct their days just like londoners). Do you get it ? Now is it that radical ?
Q. Is there a need to have AM and PM then ?
A. Its not required anymore because after all the idea behind AM/PM was to break the day into day and night and seperate out the chore you were going to do during the day from the ones you would do at night. AM/PM is not valid anymore because your 3PM is not the same as 3PM in New Delhi because they may be snoring hard in bed at 3 PM. So lets do away with AM/PM and just use the 24 hour military format. Instead of reminding yourself to catch desperate housewives at 8 PM, under DMT you only have to remember to watch it at 20 o'clock.
Q. so whats the big benefit ?
A. Well, lets list a few obvious ones..
Travel Industry will benefit tremendously. World travel will be such a breeze with all departure and arrival times being truly universal and not local times. Your intinerary will match the flight plans and best of all no need to constantly adjust your watches every time you plane lands on a different time zone. So, after a long shitty flight if you wanna know how long you have been couped up in your coach class all you have to do is subtract your arrival time from your departure time.
Airline Industry. Flight control systems and routing software will be so much more simplified with a single time. Imagine that, every flight on the planet having a universal take-off and landing time. No more complicated flight management systems, I understand that just the is not done by human brains but it still helps in reducing the margin of error.
Computing. Computers have been around for over half a century now. And time has been a important component of computers since its invention. But they being our creations we have perhaps passed on our imperfections and our notion of "time" to them as well. Every computer is configured to whatever time zone its physically located in. Agreed all computers have internal clocks whose basic tick units are independant of time zones but they are almost always reset to the time zone of its human user. So in effect what we have done is use the computer like a over priced clock to obtain the local time and then further built our software systems treating time as a local parameter and thus tying down the entire application to the geography of where the computer is located. This type of view and usage of time is endemic to almost all software. This means the computer suffers from the same notion of time as does its human counter part, ie. they are a prisoner to their longitudinal time zones and need adjustment everytime they wander out of that zone. This was fine before the onset of the digital age when computers were isolated pieces of machinery happy and content to be running their applications in their own little capsules . But now with the internet and the explosion of distributed computing, data and network packets traverse from one computer to another thousands of miles away within microseconds. And guess what, How do these computers start talking to each other when they cross geographic boundaries ?
They ask the question - "What time is it over there ?".
Agreed, this problem has been already solved and computer are good at doing just that -adjusting to new time zones, doing it faster and better than humans at least, and some might argue that thats the exact reason why computers were invented, to do all the adjustments and relieve the humans from that burden.
But what if in the digital age all computers were synchronized to one single universal time.
Wouldn't it be better if computers didn't have to deal with this time issue at all and instead focus on other problems. Time sychronization is a huge problem that scientists have pondered over the years. In fact its one of the toughest problems in science and some have concluded that it can never be really solved because time is such a relative dimension as einsten's theory of relativity tells us. But given such constraints we can device our modern control systems better and efficiently if only all computers ran under one universal time zone and dont have to perform any sychronization at all. The benefits from this for distributed computing would be tremendous. Imagine communication networks, protocols design, real-time systems, embedded systems, enterprise applications, p2p systems, communication gears, cell phones, satellite systems basically every piece of hardware and software - freed from the bondage of geographic longitude based time zones. Computer scientists are already talking about third generation control systems (first being analog, second being digital) where all systems of the future are just intelligent devices that will all be able to find each other in a global grid (internet or wireless or whatever) and communicate with each other and perform their tasks in a collaborative matrix.
Don't you think this matrix of the future would be better off with a single time zone ?
IMHO Dave could be on to something here. The time has come to perhaps clean the slate and devise a new universal clock that is well suited for the digital age. Unfortunately the internal clocks of the human citizens of this planet may not be as easily programmable as that of its electronic citizens.
So what happens to things such as - Human bio rhythms, Time/epoch based human existence, Time based social systems, Human cultural affinity towards time, Time based belief systems such as horoscopes etc
..... Stay tuned
