Time Is Meaningless
You
were probably born on two days.
Unless
your birth was between midnight in American Samoa and midnight at the International
Date Line, your life began on what you consider your birthday AND the day
after.
All
of Earth experiences being in the same calendar day once every 24 hours, giving
you a 1-in-24 chance of being extra special.
(If
you would like to do the math, American Samoa is GMT-11, which means 11 hours
behind Greenwich Mean Time, the home base for time zones. Living on the east
coast of the United States, my time is five hours less than GMT (GMT-5),
putting American Samoa six hours behind me. And, since I enjoy over-explaining
things: If the current time in Greenwich, England is 5:00am on Tuesday, my eastern
U.S. time is midnight of Monday going into Tuesday while it is 6:00pm Monday in
American Samoa’s time zone. If you are still confused, learning military time would
make things easier. And get a calculator.)
…
Before
time zones and mechanical clocks, people used sundials, which were effective
locally but impossible to sync worldwide. Our Sun appears in differently depending
on location and time of year, giving various definitions of how long daytime is
and even when “noon” comes around.
The
sundial method ceased when trains became prevalent and more people were
traveling. Watches had to be adjusted at every stop to keep track of the “local”
time.
…
Time
zones have been pointless yet controversial since Scottish engineer Sandford
Fleming introduced them in 1876.
China, the world’s fourth-largest
country by size, has one time zone.
Smaller in size,
Australia has three.
Including overseas territories,
France (which is smaller than both China and Australia) has 12, the most of any
nation.
In 2010, Russia reduced
its number of time zones from 11 to nine yet neighboring countries along the
same lines of latitude did not alter theirs.
Can we all agree that
time zones are silly, even useless?
…
Speaking of useless, Daylight
Saving Time.
The idea was first
proposed (though a satirical article written by Benjamin Franklin may have inspired
it) by New Zealand entomologist (insect researcher) George Hudson in 1784. He
wanted to skip time ahead by two hours “to go bug-hunting” and so others could
enjoy more Sunlight later in non-Summer months.
After some tuning, the familiar
one-hour jump was implemented in 1916 by Germany to conserve energy usage.
(More Sunlight = less artificial light.) The United States adopted the practice
in 1918, which farmers protested less than a year later.
Farmers disapproved of the
idea because it meant disrupting their carefully-crafted work schedules. Dairy
farmers were particularly angry since cows are apparently awful at adjusting to
changes in milking times.
Currently, around 36% of countries
observe Daylight Saving Time. Nations near the Equator do not, since their
hours of daylight stay consistent throughout the year. Most of Asia and Africa
abstain, though many nations practiced it at one time.
These places have managed
to be productive without promoting a made-up part of a made-up system.
Shocking!
…
This
brings me back to the main idea of time being invented and therefore arbitrary
and ultimately meaningless.
A worldwide time zone
would be great. Keep 24 hours in the day but make it the same time everywhere.
Does it matter that some
people's bedtime will be 9am while others have breakfast at 7pm? Nope! After
all, humans invented time (based on astronomical records) so we reserve the
right to mess with it.
…
Remember
when the world was “supposed to” end in 2012?
I
remember asking, ‘2012 according to who?’
Eastern Asian cultures
tally their own differing years, Jewish people base theirs on the Torah,
certain native tribes mark years in their own ways, yet the generally-accepted worldwide
year (at the "time" of this writing) is 2021.
For a curious aspect
regarding 2021, negative years exist. What!?
Saying something happened
in 400 B.C. (or B.C.E.) is equivalent to saying it
occurred in the year ‘negative 400’. What a strange system.
And what did the people
who lived then call their time?
Well, many things.
They counted their years
based on important events, such as the founding of Rome, the first Olympic
Games, the Yellow Emperor of China, or various religious occurrences.
(A huge debate regards
the year zero- when it was, how to calculate it, and if there were actually
two, 0 B.C.E. and 0 C.E. Exciting topics in the
time-keeping world.)
In fact, basing the
current year on Jesus's birth is likely incorrect.
Scholars and the Bible
itself give about a ten-year range of his birth, meaning we could have reached
this millennium in the mid-90s or mid-aughts, which is the obnoxious phrase for
the years 2000-2009.
The abbreviations B.C.E.
(before common era) and C.E. (common era) were introduced as
non-religious equivalents to B.C. (before Christ) and A.D.
(anno domini; Latin for 'year of our lord'). The attempt is nice but
everybody knows where the year's number came from.
It is time for that to
change.
Those in charge of such
things should get together to rename the year so everyone- religious believers,
secularists, scientists, and anybody else- can accept it. There are great minds
in all these categories. Make it work.
OR…
Forget years altogether.
Days and months make
sense because of agriculture and other factors but years are really meaningless
outside of remembering and predicting. Dates are not important.
Just remember that
something happened and its details.
…
A related facet is how
the days of the week were named.
In English, four days
were named for Norse (a.k.a. Nordic) gods, one after a Roman god, and one each
for the Sun and the Moon.
Other languages call them
different things.
For instance, what
English calls Thursday, Germans call Donnerstag. Thursday was named for
Thor, the Norse god of thunder. 'Donner' is the German word for 'thunder'. How
exciting!
But those same Germans
call Wednesday Mittwoch, which simply means ‘middle of the week’.
(In English, Thor’s godly
father is called Odin, but Wednesday comes from one of his alternate
names, Woden.)
What a mess.
…
Most people probably
think time cannot be altered. Why not!? Like country borders, humans made them
up and continue to do so.
If the world could agree
on what time it is, imagine how else we could get along.
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