this post was submitted on 31 May 2025

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Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 week ago by Pro@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Why isn't this a popular thing?

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[–] HatchetHaro@pawb.social 1 points 5 days ago

because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it's bedtime.

the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone still see the sun at roughly its highest point in the sky at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.

to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8. this is great for cities like beijing and hong kong

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Why should the UK get to be the only place with an accurate local time? I don't want to live on UK time.

[–] stangel@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago

Well the solution to our "not enough bits" problem has been generally available for 20 years. Signed bigint time would cover from the Permian Period until 290 million years from now, down to ms precision. That ought to be good enough for most use cases.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 0 points 6 days ago

100% because 0 is set to UK/France. Utc 0 should have been somewhere in the middle of pacific if it was ever intended to be adopted. Now why would India or smt set their clocks to UK?

As someone who mostly lives on UTC it's such a sad wasted opportunity and it'll never be widely adopted.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 0 points 6 days ago (8 children)

For the same reason the whole planet does not use the metric system (I'm looking at you america, you old faded superpower).

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[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Same reason some people use miles instead of kilometers, or that most people use Windows even if they hate it.

Inertia is a powerful force.

[–] cooopsspace@infosec.pub 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I work with someone who does 9-5 in the next state, a messily -4 hours away.

They get to work when I have lunch, when I'm waiting on something from them in the afternoon they're just dealing with morning shit. When their system crashes at 4:50 in the afternoon as usual I'm making dinner.

So does this colleague suddenly have to work 9-5 in +0 time. Or do they keep working real 9-5?

Worst of all, he sees a bit of daylight on the sunrise commute home. Yet I as a +10 would never see the sun.

How do you propose any of this work?

[–] Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 1 points 5 days ago

So does this colleague suddenly have to work 9-5

Worst of all, he sees a bit of daylight on the sunrise commute home. Yet I as a +10 would never see the sun.

Everyone who works a daylight job would work a daylight job with Universal Time. We exist under Universal Time right now, and yet you (and the majority of other people in the world) work during the day. Nothing would change.

Everyone would work whatever part of the day they work right now, except the numbers would change. And you'd have to learn what numbers mean "get up", "lunch", "dinner", and "sleep" because they won't be what you're used to.

The current clock numbers are entirely arbitrary. (And they repeat!) When you were a kid, you had to learn what the hours meant relative to what part of the day it was. Under universal time, you would simply relearn that. Children learning it now would never know the difference. They would think local time is weird.

I don't understand why every time this conversation comes up, there are always people who think that it means you'd have to change when you sleep, live, and work relative to the sun. I just don't get it. It just seems like such an odd conclusion to me.

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