July 9, 2193.
The crew of the space cruiser Amundsen hurtle towards the outer Oort Cloud at half a million miles an hour. A group of pilots, scientists, and engineers from all over the world are on humanity’s first mission into interstellar space.
Katerina Malkova, engineer and philologist, looks up from her work and glances out into the icy void. “I wonder what time it is back on Earth.”
“About 9:15 in the morning, I believe” offers English pilot Jeremy Shears.
Astrophysicist Jane Sakimoto snorts. “Yeah, in London maybe. Not in Tokyo.”
“Or Moscow,” Katerina replies.
American doctor James Papermaster perks up: “That means it must be after four in the morning on the East Coast.” Then, with a glance at his watch, he adds, chuckling, “My parents’ rooster should be waking everyone up in just under an hour.”
“Heh. But no, I don’t think so,” Jeremy counters. “Aren’t we in that one-week period after the UK goes back to Standard Time, but before the U.S. does? I think that makes it 5:00 AM.”
“No, it’d be the other way around—I think that means it’s 3:00 AM.”
Jeremy frowns. “Ugh. I could never keep that straight.”
“I’m from Arizona—we never had to keep it straight,” says the other American in the crew, flashing a big smile.
Team psychologist Chaha Jones sighs and chimes in: “Don’t even get me started. I’m from a town in Nepal called Birgunj, which was always 15 minutes later than Rauxal, India, which was just a couple of miles over the border to the south.”
“Fifteen minutes?” Katerina asks, perplexed.
Chaha just looks back and gives a helpless shrug.
After a moment, Jane says, “I betcha Jim’s parents’ rooster knows what time it is.”
As soon as I finished yesterday’s rant about changing the clocks, I wrote the above. I guess I wasn’t quite done ranting. Who knows, maybe I’ll write about it all week. Did I mention how much I hate it? (Once again, I got almost exactly one hour less than I should have last night. Grr.)
The vignette formed in my thoughts as I was musing over a question:
If our time system were allowed to unfold by emergent processes, rather than by the central control of 200 different governments, what would it end up looking like?
I don’t know the answer.
It might be a single planet-wide time, such that the answer to Katerina’s question would simply have been, “It’s 9:15…Earth time.”
I mentioned that notion to my wife and she was extremely skeptical that a single global time would ever arise. Some people’s sunrise would be at 6:00, some at 13:00, some at 22:00, and so on. “No one would agree to that,” she said.
Maybe she’s right. It would certainly take some getting used to.
On the other hand, a single time would have advantages. I could see such a thing arising as follows…
By 2067, global business is so integrated that it just becomes easier to have a single time. So businesses add “Global Business Time” to their websites, receipts, invoices, and contracts. Eventually, GBT becomes the norm in all business dealings.
After a time, employees get so used to it that they start using it occasionally in their daily lives. Maybe it catches on here and there in social media (or the 2067 equivalent thereof).
People start to like it. A person in Casablanca enjoys being able to talk with a friend in Canberra “at the same time.” Eventually, what began as a novelty starts to become the norm.
Or maybe not. I don’t know.
Maybe one day some brilliant person will come up with a better way of dealing with time—something we’ve never even considered before—and so many people will see the wisdom of it that it catches on.
Or maybe not. I don’t know.
Let those three words ring in the air for a moment: I. Don’t. Know.
I am just one person. I have some good ideas. I am smarter than average. But I am not fit to run anyone else’s life. I am also not fit to band together with a small group of technocrats and try to run everyone’s life.
People should run their own lives.
In the course of people running their own lives, an emergent order forms—aggregating human wisdom to produce good outcomes.
Will emergent order always get it right? No. It will be messy. Emergent order is equilibrium atop a sea of uncontrolled chaos. But it still almost always produces better results than the “experts” and busybodies in our capital cities.
Central planners, say it with me:
“I don’t know.”
Very interesting piece. The difference between the system we have and the one you propose seems to mirror the way theoretical physicists have viewed time.
Time is relative in special relativity. Every object has its own relativistic 'frame of reference' and so its own time. This is like the system we have now, the places in the world have different times, “I’m from a town in Nepal called Birgunj, which was always 15 minutes later than Rauxal…”
Time is general in general relativity. The universe has one spacetime for all space and time. This is like your, “single planet-wide time”. An idea I for one like very much. It would create some problems, but it would seem to solve a lot more than it would create. I would vote for it.
A beautiful blend of humility in not knowing with a genuine caring enough to wanna think about it. 🙏