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Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Because timezones were a result of town specific clocks, which were a result of people liking certain hours happening generally in line with where the sun is, like "noon" which still technically refers to when the sun is at its highest point.
Time zones were the result of railroads getting towns to abandon their town specific clocks because of railroads.
This really fails to acknowledge the hodegpode, anything goes chaos that was towns choosing their own noon based around someone with a watch and a bell looking at the shadow on a stick a few times a year.
Sometimes standardization isn't simply a terror induced by capitalism, and has accrual benefits.
It wasn't a hodgepodge; it was a system designed to the requirements of the day. Every town setting their own clocks to the local high noon wasn't a bad idea for a while. Hell, the ability to transfer the knowledge of time from another part of the world only came about a few generations before.
It wasn't until the railroads started operating where it became important for different cities to have the same time down to the minute. Until then, local noon worked well enough.
What you describe is very much a hodgepodge. Everyone doing their own, kinda maybe acurate thing. There were tales from this time of towns being off by 30 minutes here and there that were nearby each other. You could leave a town on a horse at noon and arrive in a town 3 miles away also at noon.
And the immediate precursor to this was the stage coach system, which had to generally approximate when a stage should show up to have fresh horses ready, and know of something had gone wrong to go look for them. That was less about minutes and more about halves or quarter of an hour.
Prior to that, the hours were rung by churches to call people to prayer, based on sundials and guesses during overcast days. The 24 hour day wasnt actually standardized into all 24 hours being the same length for centuries, because it was all solar days observation.
Where we agree is that very few people really cared about time down to the minute unless you needed to. Crops, livestock, and rains are things that are on the order of days. Even in cities, dawn, dusk, noon, were good enough for most people for centuries.
Well, the result of railroads needing to standardize time tables.
Prior to that, towns had their own local time, and often it was approximate at best, based on a guy looking at a shadow and keeping time with inaccurate tools.
Imagine trying to explain to the people of Bumblefuck, IA that the train departs Nowheresville, IA at 10:30, and is a 30 minute trip, but the train arrives in Bumblefuck at 10:52 because the town clock is the one guy that winds his watch every day.
Its a simple matter to define noon as whatever utc time you want for wherever you are