Edit: Today I learned that UTC is an actual real thing and not just a setting I scroll past on my computer 😅.
They also complicate things.
It made more sense back before we had electric lighting and when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun. Now it doesn’t seem to really matter.
Obviously, the whole world deciding where to start the time would be nigh impossible but it could be like: starting at this date, on the first day of the year, what ever point is farthest away from the sun is 00:00 from henceforth.
And then people just adapted to what that meant for their particular area. Somebody’s morning might be 13:00!
Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.
Edit: From my comment below
Look at the earth from a top down perspective. It’s a pie. With 12 or 24 slices depending on the granularity. A clock, basically. It would take the same amount of energy to learn which slice of earth is lined up towards the sun for each hour as would be to learn anything else in elementary school.
After which, for the rest of your life you’d have an intuitive grasp of where earth is in its rotation and what “time” it would be for any place in the world.
And now instead of need to know what time is it in California and Germany to schedule a meeting you need to know at what time people usually work in both places, because I’m pretty sure no one with an office job will be working in California at 11:00 UTC. At least now I know that if I schedule something I can just look at a single offset number to pick something that works for both sides. My real bane is DST and DST changing at different dates depending on the country.
So what problem would it solve?
Regardless of what time system is used, you’d still have to know the overlapping wake time of each party. It’s the same problem to be solved but viewed from a familiar point of reference vs a new point of reference.
And, it doesn’t really solve anything that time zones didn’t, with the exception that using UTC standardizes everything on global time. Not that that has any practical value either.
Just an interesting thought experiment. Sure does feel like I kicked the hornets nest tho. 😅
UTC has already standardized global time. All places have a set (may change throughout the year) UTC offset.
That’s why most of the business world is generally 8am - 6pm. Just pull up a Munich to Sao Paulo clock comparison and pick a time both of you are chained to your desks. Only the military can really operate on Zulu time because, fuck when you want to sleep, this is when it’s going down.
I don’t need to know when the Paris office is going to be awake, schedule it for 10am local.
I used to need to coordinate between +9, -10, -5, and +3… Guess who had a lot of midnight meetings.
It’s still easier to search “California time” see it’s 7:18, and that if I try to call someone now I will not get an happy person on the other side, than it is to search “at what UTC time do californians usually start working”.
This is the appropriate answer. Logically, it makes no difference either way.