#solar time

L’horloge cosmique

Horloge solaire, ou astrale, encre de chine et acrylique sur pierre plate 28 x 17,50 x 1 cm par Em’Art Comme j’ai une mémoire de l’heure infaillible mais, paradoxalement aucune mémoire du temps… J’ai créé cette horloge solaire que j’aime appelée “astrale”, de notre astre solaire. Elle a été réalisée à l’encre de chine et acrylique dorée + baguette en bois de frêne sur pierre plate 28 x 17,50 x…

Yes of course! Thanks for asking! I tried to be as in-depth as possible but if there is anything you still don't understand feel free to ask, I will then try to find a way to explain it more clearly (maybe visualize it if that would help).

Disclaimer: I am not an expert or activist in this field. This is simply something I find personally interesting and this is just my personal opinion. I'm not trying to forcibly change something or make someone think a certain way. (You might laugh now but you'd be surprised at how angry people have gotten at me for this before).

So just to clear up some basics: Time zones are artificially drawn zones (based vaguely on the Earth's longitutes) that were originally invented during the rise of the railroad in the US to help with the train schedules and were quickly adapted across the globe with the rise of globalisation and capitalism because they necessitated more standards for time measuring.

These are our current time zones:

As you can see, most of them don't go straight down following the longitudes. They're adjusted (often crossing over other longitudes) to contain for example whole countries or states within one time zone.

You should be pretty clear on all this to understand my position.

Argument number 1 for why time zones suck, maybe the weakest one: Time zones are confusing. Scheduling global online events often results in confusion, flights across time zones leave people confused about the flight time or time of arrival, crossing time zones unknowingly can cause confusion... I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that everyone has had at least one moment in their life where time zones left them confused. So right off the bat, not a super system for such a globalised world. But I understand it might not be enough to convince you that they're not the best system out there.

Argument number 2: Time zones are, unfortunately, a source of political tensions. One fairly well-known example is Xinjiang time, a time zone followed mostly by the Uyghur people in China, but not without issues. Conflicts like this have been around for as long as time zones have existed and that is such a stupid and unnecessary thing to cause such problems.

Argument number 3, my main one: As mentioned before, time zones rarely just follow the longitude straight down. This is good for political and organisational reasons, but bad for humans. Because as much as we like to deny it, we are just animals, and like most animals we have a circadian rhythm. Simplified, our circadian rhythm is dictated by the motion of the sun across the sky. If left to their own, natural devices, our bodies like to wake up around sunrise and get sleepy a little while after sunset. Simplified. But that's logical, you probably think "Obviously" because yeah, duh.

The problem is, time zones do not follow solar time. But our bodies want us to.

This is a map that shows you how far off places across the globe are from following solar time. Meaning, how many hours difference is there between noon solar time and noon in their time zone. (check the creators blog for an explanation of the map)

Most places don't follow solar time. Shockingly many are hours off. This means that most people don't (and can't) follow their local solar time according to their circadian rhythm, which results in numerous health problems that are associated with insomnia and sleep deprivation like a higher risk of heart attacks for example (Note, this is still being researched so this isn't a "100% yes, these health issues definitely arise because of this" thing, this is a "things seem to point toward this connection but there's unfortunately many factors that play into health so this is hard" thing). And I think a lot of people can attest to the fact that bad sleeping habits can have horrible effects on mental health. And boy do time zones cause bad sleeping habits.

This is where a lot of people get real angry at me: What is my personal idea of a better system? (I'm not saying this is definitely the best, just my personal favourite)

One universal time + local solar time.

How does it work?

Every clock in the world follows a single 24 hour time, a Universal Time. Which means that 5am or 6pm or 3:30pm is always the same everywhere in the world. This time zone is only used for organisational reasons. Schedules, appointments, opening hours... all this is noted in Universal Time. Which means if an event that is hosted in India says "Tomorrow at 4pm" you know exactly when that is because it is also going to be 4pm for you, because all clocks say the same thing.

But this doesn't mean that everyone in the world has to get up and go to bed at the same time, regardless of whether it's day or night for them. The time on the clock is essentially meaningless. It could just as well say "Orange" instead of "One". It's just about having something that everyone knows and understands. In fact, we already do have that in a way. All time zones are based on the Coordinated Universal Time. We know what the time is because our clocks were based on this time, we just added our respective time zone. (A small note I don't wanna get into too much: Military, air traffic, the ISS and more already do follow UTC because it avoids confusion and is always the same for everyone no matter where they are.)

And how does the solar time play into this? The solar time is for you, your neighbourgood, your town or city. With time zones abolished, people are free(er) to follow their local solar time. For example, business are no longer under pressure to open at the same hour that a business 4 hours away (but in the same time zone) opens.

A hopefully helpful example:

Let's say 9am solar time is a comfortable time for a business to open and workers to start working because ideally, they might get up at 8am solar time for work (let's says that is around sunrise, a perfect time to wake up for our bodies). Right now, with time zones, that business is 3 hours away from the longitude that their time zone is based on, so they're 3 hours away from their local solar time. All businesses in this time zone open at 9am. However it isn't 9am local solar time for this business- it's 6am local solar time. So people have to get up at 5am local solar time, far away from what their natural circadian rhythm would like. That is the reality for plenty of places (as seen on the map). Now if there were no time zones, this business would have no reason to open up at the same time as a business 3 hours away. They could simply look at their local solar time and say "Okay, we open at 9am local solar time, because people get up around sunrise at 8am solar time in this area." So if anyone wants to know when this business will open (or when to start working) they can check the business hours and find a Universal Time. So for this place 9am solar time might be 5:38pm Universal Time. They might round that to 5:30pm Universal Time. And everyone in the world will know when this time is. So people working at this business might set their alarm for 4:30pm Universal time, almost 8am local solar time, just around sunrise.

So you'd only have to know your local solar time if you want to. You would essentially fall into the same rhythm as everyone around you. Think of it like the time before time zones: Time wasn't very standardised, so everyone just eyeballed what time of day it was. And you will always know what the Universal Time means. You will know what 3pm is for you (maybe for you it's the morning) but if you don't wanna, you don't have to know what solar time it would be for you. You'd just know "Oh yes that's the morning" or whatever. The same way that right now you know 6am means morning.

Time zones have only been around for around 150 years. In the grand scheme of human history, this is a joke. We came up with a system that seemed pretty straight forward at the time but through politics and whatnot we've bastardized it to the point where it's bad for us. And if, back then, we all managed, globally, to accept time zones, I think it's not utopian to believe we could, in theory, adjust to something else in the future. Especially something that comes so fundamentally natural to us as following solar time and our circadian rhythm.

Additional reading:

It's this one

And the reason it shocked me is that it follows my thoughts about this topic so precisely that it scares me. I spent a lot of time recently-ish thinking and reading about time zones and explaining to people how I'd personally fix the system and then I read this article that is 1:1 my thoughts, straight from my brain to paper. This is just 100% exactly the article I would write about this (only I'm not as good a writer lol).

He even made the joke about "It's 5 o'clock somewhere" becoming obsolete that I've made.

Decimal system, so you have 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour

(But also, if you did 100 hours in a day, then you'd have more potential for satisfying times, like 12:34 or 34:56 or 67:89, but they'd be too short to be useful)

10 days in a week, 10 weeks in a month, 10 months in a year

So the year is now 1000 days long and contains many revolutions of the seasons - we ignore solar years for counting purposes

Or, we use the solar year, and ignore the solar day

So a solar day has around 3 decimal days in it, and you work every third and sleep every third day

But they slowly revolve around the solar days, so you have periods of sleeping through the entire day