Universal Time

Russian original text "Единое Время"

A couple of weeks ago, I called the technical support department of a company whose software I use under license. I had run into yet another "bug" or something of the sort. The person on duty suggested I speak to a specialist and promised someone would call me at eleven. Fine, I said, and waited. By 11:20, no one had called, so I phoned back and learned that they were in Houston, where the clock is an hour behind ours. When it is eleven there, it is already noon here in Boston, which means lunchtime. A small thing, perhaps, but time was lost all the same. And no one was really to blame: he did not ask what time zone I was in, and I did not think to mention it.

Another case: a couple of years ago, I was heading home from a business trip to New Mexico when my flight was canceled. Tiny town - the next plane was not until tomorrow. But not all was lost. In Odessa, a hundred miles away, there was a major airport with a flight to Boston at eight in the evening, and it was only four o'clock now. My colleague Kevin was stranded with me; we bought new tickets, got in the car, and drove to Odessa along a beautiful highway with traffic that may as well not have existed. We made it in an hour and a half and, as we approached the airport, decided that with an hour to spare, we could have dinner at a restaurant, nothing extravagant: the famous local brisket and a beer each. Well fed and in excellent spirits, we pulled into the airport and saw that the big orange electronic clock on a tall pole read 7:32. - How?! - Because, my friend, this Odessa happens to be in Texas, and Texas is one hour ahead of New Mexico - a plus, but not in our favor. Boarding had already closed, they would not let us onto the plane, the tickets were gone, and the next flight was not until tomorrow. Deja vu.

Almost everyone can remember examples like these - time-zone mix-ups and scheduling mishaps. Sometimes they amount to little more than inconvenience and wasted time, but sometimes the consequences are more serious: you miss an interview or a date. And all because of time zones, which, I dare say, strike me as one of humanity's greatest stupidities - a senseless waste of resources and a needless complication of an already complicated life.

The history of the matter goes back to ancient times: "...on the first day God created heaven and earth, water and light, and separated light from darkness." For every person, time was tied to the motion of the Sun around the Earth. That this is not exactly so - indeed, exactly the reverse - became known comparatively recently, and it changes nothing for our purposes. As long as people did not travel great distances, especially by jet plane, time caused no serious problems. In every locality, sundials were used to determine when the Sun reached its highest point above the horizon - noon - and clocks were set to 12:00. Along any given meridian, noon occurs at the same moment, provided it is not night there; but if you move east or west, it shifts by one hour for every fifteen degrees.

For example, Boston and New York differ by three degrees of longitude, and two hundred years ago, a New Yorker arriving in Boston would set his watch twelve minutes ahead. The problem arose in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, when railways linked cities on different meridians, where local time differed by fifteen or thirty minutes. To avoid chaos in the timetables, someone proposed introducing one common time for the whole island, based on the Greenwich meridian - the zero meridian.

It worked well and conveniently, and other countries also began introducing "unified time" of their own, first for railway schedules and later, by force of law, for the population at large. But then another problem emerged: England is comparatively small, whereas in America, unified time would mean that when it was noon in Boston, it was three in the afternoon in San Francisco. Roughly speaking, people somehow insisted on having noon happen at twelve. So the engineer Sanford Fleming proposed the idea of twenty-four time zones, fifteen degrees of longitude to each. In 1884, at an international conference in Washington, the time zones were approved, and the Greenwich meridian was adopted as the midpoint of the zero zone. It was also then that the start of a new day ceased to be noon, as it had been before, and became midnight.

Under this system, a new day began at the 180th meridian, which runs from the North Pole to the South Pole through sparsely populated stretches of the Pacific Ocean. This imaginary line came to be called the International Date Line: cross it from west to east and you step into yesterday, into the past; cross it from east to west, and you enter tomorrow, the future. The very idea is incredible. One can perhaps make peace with it in London; out on the ground, not everybody does. Fortunately - joking, of course - compliance with international time-zone boundaries is not mandatory for local jurisdictions. The Date Line, for instance, runs almost exactly through the Bering Strait separating Russian Chukotka from American Alaska, and that seems right enough: two worlds, let them live in two different days. But the Aleutian Islands ended up in the Eastern Hemisphere, so, for the convenience of American citizens, the line in that area was moved five hundred miles to the west.

And if something is not forbidden, it must be permitted. The chiefs of Kiribati moved this unfortunate line eastward by no fewer than two whole time zones, so that by crossing a certain line drawn across the surface of the ocean, you do not travel twenty-four but twenty-five hours into the future. Online, I found one delightful consequence of the arrangement: if it is ten in the morning on Friday in London, five in the morning the same Friday in Boston, and eleven on Thursday night at the far-off U.S. base on Midway Atoll in the Pacific, then on Christmas Island, which belongs to Kiribati, Saturday has already begun. They say Kiribati shoved the Date Line so dramatically in order to attract tourists, conjuring up yet another wonder of the world out of thin air. And in fact, there is something marvelous about stepping across the Greenwich meridian and finding yourself in another hemisphere; I have been guilty of that myself.

The International Date Line affects only a small part of humanity, and captains of ships and airplanes reset their clocks automatically when they cross the 180th meridian, without losing sleep over which island jurisdiction they happen to be passing over. But let us return to time zones. Everyone knows, of course, that there are not twenty-four of them, as one might expect after dividing the Earth's 360 degrees by fifteen. - Then how many are there? - The answer depends on the season. Today, for example, as I am writing these lines, there are thirty-eight. Still, in a couple of weeks, on the first day of Farvardin, when the Iranian mullahs announce the switch to daylight saving time, there will be thirty-seven, because Iranian time will then coincide with the Afghan zone, inshallah. - And why so many? - Because of an excess of freedom, India, Iran, New Zealand, and others have introduced time zones offset by fifteen, thirty, and forty-five minutes. In Islamabad, Pakistan, it is five in the morning; in New Delhi, India, five-thirty; and in neighboring Kathmandu, five-forty-five. Charming, is it not?

But in my opinion, Australia still holds the record. No matter how much you drink, you will not make sense of it - which, apparently, was never the goal. Geographically speaking, the country has three time zones: in the Western zone, Perth, it is 8:00 a.m.; in the Central zone, Alice Springs, 9:30; and in the Eastern zone, Brisbane, exactly 10:00. Clear as chocolate. - Except that it only seems so: Sydney is in the same Eastern zone as Brisbane, yet there it is already eleven. - Why? - Elementary, my dear fellow: Sydney has already switched to daylight saving time, while Brisbane and the state of Queensland refuse to recognize it. By then, the brain simply declines to process further details: if you fly from Adelaide to Brisbane in June, winter, of course, you move your watch forward by thirty minutes, but in December, you set it back by half an hour. To be fair, every madness has its system, and Australia's present division into time zones did not arise by accident but was the result of long years of legislative labor by individual provinces. As early as 1899, the central Australian states moved their clocks from nine to nine-thirty to reduce the advantage enjoyed by stockbrokers in the eastern states, where the market had previously opened a whole (!) hour earlier.

Clearly, the introduction of daylight time and standard time - the spring ritual of moving the hands forward by an hour and the autumn ritual of moving them back - only made matters worse and reduced the whole business to absurdity. Each country changes its clocks on whatever day it pleases, often according to climate, religious calendars, or some touching desire to "minimize inconvenience to the population": "We move the clocks at two in the morning on the last Sunday in March."

China

No one - more precisely, no local authority - would ever dream of coordinating the date of a clock change even with neighboring jurisdictions. Yet entire countries have already realized that the harm done by daylight saving time greatly exceeds its imagined benefit and have abandoned it, China and Russia among them. That may have improved life for them, but internationally, it brought nothing positive: the complexity did not decrease, while the very idea was discredited. If dictatorial regimes abolish something, then democracies will defend daylight saving time to the last bullet. China went further still and merged all of its zones - which, given the country's width, would have been five - into one, and... nothing terrible happened. Why not? I will explain in a moment.

If you have made it this far, you have probably guessed that the author favors the forcible liquidation of this chaos and the introduction of one Universal Time for the entire planet Earth. The idea is not mine, and obviously, its opponents are legion, its supporters much fewer - for now - while the remaining 99.99 percent of the Earth's inhabitants seem convinced that Voltaire was absolutely right when he wrote in Candide, "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." If these time zones exist, they must somehow be for our own good. If the free people of Hawaii and Arizona have abolished the seasonal clock change, that is their private affair; let the programmers add a couple of conditional operators to the code.

Of course, programmers are paid for that and muddle through the problem of time reckoning well enough: my Android automatically switched to daylight saving time today, and thanks to that, I was not late taking my granddaughter to figure skating - though I did get a slight fright when I looked at my wristwatch that morning. Writing such software is probably easier than, say, designing a self-driving car, but it is still not for beginners. Even arranging a simple work meeting for employees of a bank with branches on five continents already requires taking a great many things into account: what time zone each participant is in, local working hours, individual schedules, who outranks whom, holidays, vacations... As Cyril N. Parkinson, author of the famous Parkinson's Laws, wrote, "Growth leads to complexity, and complexity leads to decay." He meant the British Empire, but there is no reason to think the modern system of time zones will somehow be spared that fate. The employees of your Kiribati branch will inevitably try to join the meeting a day late - or a day early - and will have no one to blame but themselves.

Anyone curious about the history of time zones, the International Date Line, and daylight saving time can look online and find a wealth of fascinating information and rationalizations for why all this is necessary. The logic, for example, goes something like this: the workday at a factory begins at eight in the morning - always, because that is apparently a law of nature - and in winter it cannot begin any earlier because workers will not find their way in the dark, or will have to eat breakfast by candlelight, which is expensive. But in summer, dawn comes earlier, so daylight saving time must be introduced, and the hands must be moved forward by an hour. This theory of daylight time - ideally leading to a savings in candles - is attributed to Benjamin Franklin himself; perhaps that is why he took such an interest in electricity. In the middle latitudes, after all, the length of daylight varies through the year from seven hours to eighteen, so in principle one could move the clocks by an hour every month.

So let us put it to a vote. Who is in favor of having one single time everywhere on Earth? At every point, always, in winter and in summer alike, in Moscow and in Rio de Janeiro. Someone will say: Perhaps we can part ways with daylight saving time, but surely, we cannot do without time zones. I have asked this question of many acquaintances, and almost every time - often after a sarcastic chuckle - the argument ran like this: Suppose universal time were the same as what Greenwich time is now. Then people in America, especially in California, would have to work at night!

Nothing of the sort. Suppose it is seven in the morning in London: the sun has just risen, time to get up and go to work. In Boston, the clock also reads 7:00, but sunrise is still five hours away, so sleep peacefully. Around noon, it finally gets light, you get up, eat breakfast, take the subway to the office - most institutions open at 13:00. They finish work at 21:00, when it begins to get dark; in Los Angeles, they finish at 24:00, because the sun takes another three hours to get there from Boston. And that is the only thing people would need to get used to: in different places, dawn comes at different hours. But that is true already now; it simply depends on season and latitude. Beyond the Arctic Circle, there are days when the sun does not appear at all, and life goes on perfectly well: polar bears sleep for months, while people work every day, by candlelight or electricity.

What one gains in return is that the question "What time is it?" no longer requires mental effort and the inevitable follow-up: - Where? - Everywhere. It is Saturday, 5:01. - In Africa too? - There as well. If you board a plane in New York headed for Moscow - ten hours in the air - you land there at 15:00, and it is still the same Saturday, not Sunday, and not according to some local legal fiction, but by global time. If a meeting in Delhi is scheduled for 3:00, then on every participant's calendar it will be at exactly 3:00, not 3:15 for the Iranians or 2:45 for the Nepalese.

At this point,, we should reassure the poor souls who write calendar software - the scarred veterans of Y2K: no one will be out of a job. The time may be unified, but, as in prehistoric days, Americans will still be at work while Germans are already drinking beer, and your electronic secretary will still have to take that into account and reconcile conflicting interests. So go on programming - all the former time-zone idiocy will remain with you. I remember that when I worked with a German company, they very conveniently scheduled meetings for three in the afternoon, so that it was nine in the morning in Boston. Later their feelings toward the American colleague cooled slightly, and our European comrades moved the daily meeting to their own 9:00 a.m. I started setting my alarm for three in the morning and held out until they finally switched from English to German.

Yes, for a while it will feel strange, almost wild: in some countries people will have to take their children to day care at 22:00 - though it will still be morning, technically speaking. But human beings get used to everything, especially when it improves life. It is like the first time you switch from a manual transmission to an automatic: five minutes of discomfort, and then - Lord, how convenient! Why did I suffer for thirty years? And is it not equally strange to arrive yesterday, to work the night shift in a hospital while everyone else is asleep, or to call July a winter month, as they do in the Southern Hemisphere? Yet everyone has gotten used to that, too. They might just as well have arranged things so that when moving to Australia, March turned into September - at least in a few provinces.

Whatever the opponents of common sense may say, whatever arguments they may bring against it, the future belongs to one single Earth-wide time. Why? Because it suits the Chinese Communist Party and the Davos globalists perfectly: one state, one leadership, one banking system - why should time be any different? Especially when in the end there will be only one jurisdiction as well. Have I convinced you?

If not, then simply fear God, who created day and night, space and time - and even the theory of relativity, later relayed to the rest of us through Albert Einstein - and leave Time alone.

(c) Dimus 2022, 2026