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.
It’s interesting that we do this with time, but not with months. Summer months being December to February in the Southern Hemisphere never made the top of the list for problems to solve.
Why? What’s a “Summer month” other than some euro-centric bullshit?
Fair enough. Months and seasons are completely arbitrary and some cultures have 6 seasons instead of 4, for example.
The concept of timezones (different place have different sun time) is probably older than the Gregorian calendar, too.
Exactly. It’s interesting how some things feel set in stone but after thinking them through you realize that the conventions are largely arbitrary.
Months have less variation. In the north, it’s “traditional”, in the south, it’s inverted, in the middle, it’s climatic (tied to monsoons etc). The northern hemisphere has been dominant in recorded history for a LONG time, so sets the reference. The inverted mapping is nice and clean to remember. While the tropics have no clean mapping.
The traditional calendar won because we need a consistent global reference, and a local reference wasn’t worth the hassle.