Except if we did abolish time zones rather than asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" you ask it "is it the waking hours in Melbourne".
In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).
That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.
Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.
If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.
Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.
I agree with you on that, but there's still a piece of this puzzle left unaddressed. Using UTC would improve the clock, but the calendar would end up worse.
This isn't actually discussing abolition of time zones---it's discussing going from ~24 time zones to having only 1 time zone. It essentially maximizes the errors inherent in having a finite number of time zones for an infinite number of locations on the planet.
Which is why we need not one time zone, but infinite time zones. Let time zones be continuous rather than discrete.
Now when somebody says "It's noon" we know the sun is exactly over their head. Not slightly off because they live to the eastern or western extreme of their time zone, but exactly.
Okay, so to the problem of "is it okay to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne?"
My increasingly-intelligent digital assistant (also known as a smart phone) knows who Uncle Steve is, and where he lives (thanks to his address and phone number, entered into my contact list). Based on his location and the (UTC) clock in the phone, the device calculates Steve's continuous local time. Now with greater precision than under the traditional discrete timezone system, I can determine where Steve is at regular to typical waking/sleeping hours.
Whereas lumping the world into a single timezone maximizes the divergence between the clock's reading and the sun's position, moving to infinite time zones minimizes the divergence to zero.
However, in this fully relative world it's more difficult to speak about specific moments of time. The State of the Union Address would be advertised as happening 7pm 77°00′32.63606″W
What does that mean in my own local time zone?
Well, once again technology will save us from this difficulty by automatically translating times on television announcements / Twitter posts / in telephone conversations from someone else's local time to ours.
---
It's fun to imagine a world with infinite time zones, but I think the "abolition" article and this exploration illustrate together that the time zone system we have is a reasonable, human-friendly compromise between extremes.
That’s going to make catching your train or plane or trying to do multiple transport connections a nightmare. What time do I have to leave my house driving east to catch the 7pm flight? And note the clocks will change as you drive making it hard to understand if you’re late or not. It also assumes everyone has a device that does this work for you, which would be really tough to work around when it runs out of battery.
Nice essay. Some good points about the past still having time zones so programming might not get any simpler. I think appropriately adjusted "Do Not Disturb" settings on his uncle's phone could have save him a lot of the trouble.
In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone).
That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm.
Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place.
If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into.
Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.