[ghaff]

:-) I’m somewhat sympathetic to the complaints of parents with young children but as someone who travels about 100 days a year, almost entirely to different and often distant time zones a 1 hour change isn’t even really on my radar.

[styfle]

As someone who travels a lot, do you think timezones are valuable or do you think there would be value in everyone adopting UTC?

[juanmirocks]

This is a good question and I guess there are pros and cons. This would certainly simplify schedules and meetings between different time zones. On the other hand, it would totally screw up our understanding of when things are supposed to happen, specially when traveling. Like as in: it is 3am, is it time for lunch now ?

My biggest question anyway is how we will manage time once we become a multi planet species.

[styfle]

> it is 3am, is it time for lunch now?

Why can't you eat when you're hungry?

Why can't you go to sleep when it gets dark?

A better way to manage when things should happen is to create a schedule which could be defined in UTC. I don't think the time zones really solve this problem.

For example, I might assume that I can eat dinner when my plane lands in my destination around 8pm. But when I look for a local restaurant, they all close at 8pm because it's a smaller town. I still need to look at the hours of operation for that business.

So I can't really make assumptions based on the local time anyway so why do we need to adjust them.

> how we will manage time once we become a multi planet species.

Excellent question! We would probably need to remove the concept of "days" because that is relative to the current planet.

[ghaff]

Time zones are valuable. They let me easily convert to local time which gives me a pretty good immediate intuitive feel (modulo differences in customs) for the types of activities appropriate to that time of day.

Mind you. I screw things up. Just did it with a meeting the other day. But with electronic calendaring it’s not too bad.

Added: when traveling, time zones let me change my watch once and I immediately more or less know time appropriate activities that more or less correspond to what I’m used to at home.

[juanmirocks]

I must ask: I do not have children. Do young fellas go crazy over a change in 1 hour or what?

[tatersolid]

My kids are a slight pain in the ass for a few days after “spring forward”. Despite all attempts to ensure plenty of sleep, there’s always increased fighting, crying and - like today - increased physical clumsiness that results in a 6 year old skinning his hands and knees on the sidewalk.