How to switch to UTC
UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) is basically the same thing as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). It is the zero-offset time zone.
As the world gets global, it gets confusing to use all the different timezones. It would be good to have a uniform system to name the time — and UTC is the best candidate.
UTC is already used by airplane pilots when they communicate time — because the planes travel often between timezones, and you don’t want some pilot or control tower to get confused in the time-zone names and time translation.
The local time system that is in use now has the advantage that the time (in the local time zone) corresponds to some degree to the sun position on the sky. In general you expect that 8:00am is in the morning (sunrise), and at 1:00am you expect that it’s dark.
The drawbacks of the local time system become appearent when people travel or communicate between timezones: a traveller has to adjust his watch when travelling, and continously make mental transformations to compute the time in the other time zone. Whatsmore, were there a single (unique) timezone, we could drop the timezone concept altogether, and only talk about time (or Earth time, when need comes).
Also the communication between people is now global — instant messenger, VOIP calls, skype etc. More and more people talk between timezones. It’s easy to see the babel scenario when co-workers use different time-zones each to name the time. For example:
A: What about having the meeting at 9:00 PDT?
B: Sorry, I have to leave at 18:00 CEST.
C: 18:00 EEDT works fine for me.
A: Ok, what about 8:00 PDT then?
Here is the plan for the global switch to UTC:
- Eliminate Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time) in all time-zones (have a single time throughout the year in each timezone).
- Merge close-by zones: Eastern Europe (EET, e.g. Romania) and Central Europe (CET, e.g. Germany) would adopt U.K. time (UTC); The United States would merge into a unique time zone (e.g. PST or EST). This should reduce the global number of time-zones to about half a dozen.
- Start communicating the time both in the local timezone and in UTC (in order for the population to get used to UTC).
- Abandon the remaining timezones, everybody adopts UTC only.
Of course, an ambitious endeavor, to unify the timezones. To put it in perspective, is it more difficult than the human flight to Mars? Or is it easier than the power-plug unification?
On the plus side, I think it would be enough for some major countries to adopt UTC (China, India, US, European Union, Russia, Japan) and the others will follow.