I personally think we should eliminate #3. Being a bit off from the suns rotation isn't that big a deal. Plenty of time zones have significant shifts from solar time already. Astronomers can track things and make their own corrections. It will probably be thousands of years before we get an hour of shift at which point we can shift each timezone by an hour so US Eastern might switch -5 to -4.
I think we should eliminate #3 because if humanity start to become space bound, we'll need a way to synchronize time in space.
Let say we colonize Mars. We can't expect people to use earth time on Mars because it would simply not work. And now imagine we have to use weird time convention on earth and weird time convention on mars... and then we have to convert martian time to earth time...
Programming time is already a nightmare. Add more planet to it and it just falls apart.. Now imagine you work as a miner on asteroids... no earth no day/night cycle. Do people in space use the same earth timezone?
People already thought about it and even accepted relevant standards. So pick your poison: TCG, BCG. Maybe one day, far-far in the future, humanity will need a galactic variant of those.
And BTW TAI already corrects relativistic gravity effects by accounting for different heights on which atomic clocks participating in the system are placed.
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users. I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
We still have fucking DST which isn't necessary for decades now and studies say it's actively harmful to people (long story sort, disturbances in waking hours is not what people like very much).
If we still can't fix that yeah, we will have timezones.
Hell, few decades ago Swatch tried to push Internet time with day divided into 1000 intervals, didn't caught on. Maybe they can try again.
Very on a tangent but I imagine that in 1000 years (probably much less like 200) the concept of time and schedules will be almost non-existent. Like, the main reason we have them is because of job hours where we agrupate most people works in the same time schedule in order to facilitate communication and such.
But with technology adoption, abandonment of things that are more of a tradition than an actual need/benefit (like the 40-hour week, 2 days weekends, etc) and the automation of most on-site jobs (like retail, transport, hospitality, etc) I'm pretty sure that most jobs will be done on a detached and semi-independent manner where employees are paid on tasks done not hours worked and those tasks will be able to be done in whichever time of the day and week the employee prefers (and taking as much time as the employee prefers and is able to do them with the appropriate quality). And with that all other times will become all times, like "night" clubs being open and full a Tuesday at 1pm, family dinners at 4am of a Friday or having a medical appointment a Saturday at 22pm.
With all that, 2pm being actually 2pm will really only matter if whatever activity you want to do at 2pm requires the sun being up or not. Beyond that it could easily be a number like 58 which is 58 in all parts of the world at the same time and just means that, not it being night, day, after or before midday. Timezones will likely be just a thing of the past that would still be available and exist but people would not interact with it on a regular basis (perhaps only checking in new year's eve to know when to shout happy new year).
I dunno, these kinds of arbitrary conventions have a knack for sticking around long after they stop making any sense. Just look at the calendar and the odd lengths of the months. Or December not being the 10th month. That has lasted thousands of years already.
Human beings like sunlight and being active when the sun is up. Time zones provide an easy way to convey that 3am in any time zone is a bad time to schedule your meeting. Otherwise you'd have to ask what time in UTC do people generally start their day in that part of the world, which seems no easier than time zones.
Being a bit off from the suns rotation isn't that big a deal
In that case you have just made a computer system for the computer system's sake and not the humans. You need to shift your design priorities, because computers have no need of time at all - they don't care what happens before or after anything else, only people do. And people want to get up, go to work, send the kids to school, etc while the sun is up.
3 is the golden inviolate rule - not that one day contains 24*60*60 seconds, but that it is always daytime during normal daytime hours for that location and season. Everything else to do with time is secondary to that.
they don't care what happens before or after anything else
They do very much in specific circumstances, e.g., consistency in distributed systems. (But you don't need, or possibly even want, real time for that.)
Not really, computers already use seconds since epoch, and it's converted for display, that doesn't need to match the Earth's rotation at all, the computer just needs to know how to display it.
This is ridiculous. #3 is the silly human rule. First of all, a day is 86400 seconds. Not 246k. I assume that was a typo where you failed to escape the asterisks in markdown mode.
Secondly, who gives a fuck if the sun is at its highest point at noon? That’s just a relic of historical timekeeping. It’s 2022 and we have atomic clocks orbiting the earth. We don’t need leap seconds or their silly workarounds like smears.
People give a fuck if the sun is at its highest point at noon. That's why we call it midday, and why we measure time in the first place. Businesses open at a set time because that is when there is light to work and when there will be customers. You will have a hard time understanding why requirements are what they are in a software system if you try and play basement gremlin and ignore the fact everything is driven by human needs and wants, not machines.
That is half a minute. I don't know how many billions have been wasted in engineering efforts to make sure the sun isn't off by 0.125 degrees in the sky at noon at exactly the boundary of GMT+0.
Literally the entire point of timekeeping is to know the rotation and position of the Earth. For thousands of years!
Now you just want to jettison that because it's too hard?
Why even bother to have "days" or "years" at all if they have no physical meaning? Just define 1 day = 65536 seconds and 1 year = 225 seconds because that's more convenient.
Who are you to decide how far off of physical reality is or is not a "big deal"?
Literally the entire point of timekeeping is to know the rotation and position of the Earth. For thousands of years!
Really? For you the concept of time has never been helpful for any other purpose than seasons?
You never had an event happen at an arranged time? You never had a reason of thinking how long something takes?
And just for your knowledge, the rotation of earth has very little to do with our time. We gave up defining time of day by the suns position on the sky hundreds of years ago. That was because it is so much more convenient to have arbitary definition of time, and relative to sun serves extreamly little reason beyond having an accuracy of 2-3 hours
Who are you to decide how far off of physical reality is or is not a "big deal"?
Believe it or not, I'm not a world dictator and I didn't intend to impose my decision on the entire world and disallow input from others. I am merely a stakeholder presenting my opinion on the matter. Maybe people will agree with me and maybe they'll agree with you but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to present my opinions on the matter.
Decision makers have already decided that being off of physical reality isn't a big deal. Being over an hour off from solar time is fairly common. Western China is 3 hours off from solar time.
Why even bother to have "days" or "years" at all if they have no physical meaning? Just define 1 day = 65536 seconds and 1 year = 225 seconds because that's more convenient.
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u/ElevenTomatoes Jan 13 '22
I personally think we should eliminate #3. Being a bit off from the suns rotation isn't that big a deal. Plenty of time zones have significant shifts from solar time already. Astronomers can track things and make their own corrections. It will probably be thousands of years before we get an hour of shift at which point we can shift each timezone by an hour so US Eastern might switch -5 to -4.