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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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81–90 of 406 posts

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#81
post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

I'll meet you half way: let's place UTC next to the local time everywhere we can. It could be in parenthesis, in a tooltip, etc. It could get us all used to knowing our time in UTC and eventually help in cross-timezone communication.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#83
post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

Do you mean replace conventional wall clocks with 24 hour versions, all set to UTC?

I object on the grounds we could no longer say it's five o'clock somewhere in the world when we open a bottle in the daytime.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#84
post #70
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…

> * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day? The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones d…

More often than not, one's morning or afternoon is late in the evening or in the middle of the night for the other person. So morning is almost unambiguously referring to the westernmost person and afternoon to the easternmost.

Instead if the working day begins at 23:00 (as would be the case for Pacific time) for me and 8:00 for you, but the meeting is already at 1:00/10:00, it is unclear if you mean "at 1:00 of Wednesday, which is on the working day that started Tuesday at 23:00" or "at 1:00 of Tuesday, on the working day that started Monday at 23:00".

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#85
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pro for having UTC, not a pro for having no time zones. I believe this is the main reason that going against time zones is flawed---people don't exactly know what they are claiming!

When everyone works on the same timezone it's the same as not having timezones.

But when everyone doesn’t live in the same spot on earth, it becomes tricky.

Time for living things is primarily based on the course of the sun above their heads.

Hence timezones to adjust between the local needs, and the worldwide synchronization.

UTC is plenty enough to offer a good sync reference for distributed teams. Swatch beats was a good idea too, but failed.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#86
post #70
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…

> * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day? The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones d…

> It's already not clear if "Tuesday morning" means my Tuesday morning or yours

In 99% of cases of my communications it's perfectly clear because it's the same for both of us. The GP said that without a local timezone Tuesday Morning would be ambiguous even in a local context.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having English as the official language of the EU when England isn’t in the EU would be quite funny.

What other language could the EU possibly use as a common language for communications between member states? English is the only language that you can use everywhere within the union and have a decent chance of being able to communicate with people (and this is true everywhere else in the world too).

It'll finally be the year of the Esperanto lingua franca.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#88
post #40
post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

I’m with you on the last two but a life without timezones sounds horrible. So many issues, like having to relearn the clock when you are in another timezone. I’ll meet you for lunch at 06.00! Life is based around the sun. Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though, whether that was GMT or something less euro centric. So everyone would understand “we have a zoom meeting at 11.00 WT” instead of…

UTC is nice not because it is euro centric, but because there is a lot of sea on the opposite side of GMT and therefore it is pretty easy to place the date change line. There are multi-timezone countries on both sides of the oceans (USA, Russia, and the European Union basically counts as a third) so the date change line has to stay on the sea.

There is only one good alternative, which would be to place the date change line in the middle of the Atlantic (between UTC-3 and UTC-2) and the fundamental time zone in Japan or somewhere Australia (UTC+9/UTC+10).

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#89
post #78
post #6

This is fine to do while we are still talking about space missions and quick landings, but the moment there is a base and people start to live there semi-permanently you won't be able to just pin it to UTC and call it a day. Timezones are already bad enough in software. Having to additionally account for the moon would make people quit the profession.

I think a more interesting argument is: Humans are 24-hour creatures (ok, maybe not precisely 24 hours, but close enough). That's how our internal clocks are wired. Its not nurture; its nature; and it would take generations living day-in day-out with a different cadence before we see biological adjustments. Sure, our clocks are 24-hours-a-day because that syncs up well with the rotation of the earth. That's the scien…

Idk we're planning these missions in the near/immediate future, so we need standardized times for those immediately future missions. Everything else comes later.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#90
post #70
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…

> * If I live too far from the UTC, the day will change in the middle of my working day. My friend said they'd see me on Tuesday. Do they mean the day that had Tuesday at the beginning of it, or the end? What does "Tuesday morning" mean when morning is at the end of the Tuesday? Is "morning" the beginning of the solar day or the beginning of the clock day? The problem there is the lack of specificity, and timezones d…

As someone frequently half a world off from those I'm scheduling a call with, it helps to adapt a format that explicitly states [calendar date] [24hr time] my time / [calendar date] [24hr time] your time.
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