WIRED

Sommarøy, a tiny Norwegian island perennially dazzled by light in summer and smothered by darkness in winter, made headlines in June 2019 with the news it had taken the executive decision to cancel the concept known as time. “If you want to paint your house at 2am, it’s OK. It we want to take a swim at 4am, we will,” wrote Kjell Ove Hveding, the leader of the campaign, on its Facebook page.

This was later revealed to be a publicity stunt to promote tourism on the island, but the idea that time isn't as immutable as we think isn’t going away. In March 2019 the European Parliament voted to scrap daylight saving time (DST) changes, instead allowing member states to choose whether they want to stay on summer or winter time for the whole year.


But why stop at scrapping DST when you could get rid of time zones altogether? This is what Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at John Hopkins, and Dick Henry, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins are agitating for: the ushering in of ‘Universal Time’.

But first, a potted history of how time zones came to be. Before the introduction of the mechanical clock, people told the time using sundials. This meant time varied even across short distances: noon in Oxford might be ten past in London, say. Greenwich meantime was accordingly established in 1675.

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Time zones themselves were the brainchild of Scottish-born engineer, Sir Sandford Fleming, prompted by the annoyance of a missed train in Ireland in 1876. “Fifteen degrees of longitude was the benchmark used for a 24-hour day, hence there were 15 degree time zones set up theoretically internationally with the ‘half-way’ point being 180 degrees from Greenwich in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” says Stanley Brunn, professor of geography at the College of Arts and Sciences.

It’s something we don’t really think about, yet time and how to manage is a fairly contentious and historically troublesome topic. Take the amount of time-tweaking that went on in the past year: aside from much DST-related dissent in countries like Australia and the US, Morocco put its clocks back for one month during Ramadan 2019 (despite deciding to scrap seasonal time adjustments in 2018), São Tomé and Príncipe, the African island nation, decided to change its clocks back to GMT after switching to West Africa Time (WAT) a year earlier. The year before, both Kazakhstan and a state in Russia decided to switch time zones permanently.


But even without this interminable flip-flopping, time zone quirks exist the world over. To pull up some particularly egregious examples: Russia has 11, while China has only one; Nepal is the only place in the world where the time is (inexplicably) set to quarter past the hour, while two in Australia are set to the half hour; Spain abides by Central European Time (CET) despite being geographically in line with the UK, meaning its citizens suffer a form of constant social jetlag – meaning their daily schedule isn't consistent with their biological clocks. Is the fact that time zones make very little sense reason enough to scrap them?

Hanke and Henry’s answer to all this confusion is a single time zone for the entire world. If it’s 9pm in London, it should be 9pm in Canberra too, the argument goes. At present, global time set to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) is already used by airline pilots – for obvious reasons – and international finance and trade, to make sure that transactions are made at the same time. “We are all at the same time right now,” says Hanke. “So we should all be setting our watches exactly at the same place.” So far, so convincing.

But what would this look like in practice? Both China and India, vast countries that span a number of Fleming’s time zones, have only one standard time – perhaps providing a test case for what universal time could look like. China spans five time zones, meaning the western end of the country trails the east by about four hours. Despite this, there is only one Beijing Time, first instituted by the Communist Party to stimulate a sense of national unity. A lack of locally adapted official hours for work and school means that those furthest from Beijing get up in darkness, or head to bed while it’s still light. “Their lives are three or four hours off of local solar time,” says Brunn.

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This is most extreme in the western province of Xinjiang for example, and is a touchpoint for political tensions. While the Han Chinese, who make up the majority of the population, go by Beijing time, the Uighur Muslim population follows a ‘local time’ that is set two hours ahead. This has been politically weaponised in the past, with a Uighur man detained in 2018 for having his watch set to local time.


This isn’t entirely unusual. Time zones have been leveraged as a political tool throughout history (something Hanke and Henry argue the introduction of Universal Time could put a stop to). In 2015, North Korea decided to wind its clocks back half an hour, instigating Pyongyang time “to emphasize its political independence and celebrate the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonialism,” according to Jonathan Hassid, assistant professor in Political Science at the State University of Iowa. However, in 2018, after the country's relations with South Korea warmed, the clocks were again set to align with their southern neighbour. Venezuela also changed its time zone under the government of Hugo Chavez, again to signify political self-determination, and to avoid sharing a time zone with its arch enemy, America. “It's a way to signal to the international community and the domestic population about political decisions,” explains Hassid.

But beyond politics, time zones are also associated with serious health impacts. In India, where there is also only one time zone, populations in the west of the country experience the sun rising and setting later, despite having to follow the same official working hours. In practice, this means people tend to go to bed later but don’t get up any later, which can have serious consequences. “Sleep-deprived children are less likely to attend school, decrease time spent studying, and increase time spent on sedentary and compensatory leisure activities,” says Cornell University PhD candidate Maulik Jagnani, who wrote a paper on this topic.

Other studies have revealed the same effect at the western edges of time zones in the US. In these regions, rates of breast cancer, obesity, diabetes and heart disease are higher. This is primarily down to the chronic disruption of circadian rhythms associated with having to wake up in the dark.

Could universal time solve some of these issues? Hanke proposes that without the strictures imposed by a particular time zone, different locations would be free to tamper with their local working hours and timetables. Although all the clocks would be set to the same time, business hours would vary by location. “You would be more in tune with circadian rhythms, because the local times would be set according to the sun or local social habits, which would be geared by the sun more than time zones – there wouldn't be time zones so the problem goes away,” says Hanke.

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This means that a location two hours west of GMT might implement new working hours of 11am to 7pm, to account for solar time. How much chaos could this recalibrating of time cause? Hanke likens it to switching from fahrenheit to celsius. But given we don’t tether events of the day to temperature, we could perhaps expect slightly more disruption.

But if introducing universal time resulted in greater respect for our circadian rhythms, then it could be for the best. Many scientists argue that the only time that should matter is solar time. There is increasing evidence that our modern age's shunning of the biological body clock is the source of all kinds of health and psychological problems. Could universal time be the answer?

Hanke believes that the introduction of universal time at some point is “inevitable”. “Time is elastic, it is fluid, it is dynamic; distance means next to nothing in cybertime and cyberspace,” agrees Brunn. “What is important is being connected for whatever purposes. If something stands in the way of being efficient or responsive, those barriers seek to be removed. And time zones are one of those barriers.”

Updated 28.10.19, 11:20 GMT: Airlines use Universal Coordinated Time, which is a time standard and not GMT, which is a time zone

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