| 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. |