It's impressive that all the countries of the world were able to synchronize their time. amirite?

If you look at times zones though it is still a bit haphazard. Could be worse, obviously, but we haven't synced up near as well as we could. Could be worse, I suppose, I will grant you that.

by Anonymous 2 days ago

I think the sun played a large part in that

by Anonymous 2 days ago

Yeah it's almost as if time keeping is an observation of the physical world and not just some completely made up concept.

by Longjumping-Day4493 2 days ago

Days, sure. Hours/Seconds etc are made up.

by Anonymous 2 days ago

Midday isn't made up. Midnight isn't made up. Sunset and Sunrise aren't made up. Sure the length of the units is arbitrary but the division of the day into units and when those units might start has some link to the physical world

by Anonymous 2 days ago

That's the point OP is making… adjacent countries would have different times for physical world noon, sunset etc. Yet they agreed on not doing that but chose to align minutes/seconds

by Anonymous 2 days ago

And for a long time they didn't agree. It just slowly became required because of trains, ships and forms of long distance communication. This is just another small aspect of globalization, and IMO not even a particularly impressive one.

by Turbulent-Youth 2 days ago

For a lot of history, day and night were each divided into equal parts, but those parts weren't the same between day and night, and definitely didn't divide the day neatly. Just as valid an interpretation of time

by Anonymous 2 days ago

hours are fractions of a day, minutes fractions of an hour, and seconds fractions of a minute. They're as made up as days are We could have ended up with different fractions (e.g. hours being a tenth of a day) - so what fraction they are is a little arbitrary (but there were historical reasons), but having them is not

by Reanna56 2 days ago

I'm pretty sure OP is talking about time zones and UTC.

by Afraid_Hunt 2 days ago

As I said elsewhere, for a lot of history, days and nights were separately divided into fractions, but those didn't divide the full days into fractions.

by Anonymous 2 days ago

The thing is that distance and weight measurements are fractions. And we hand tons of those across countries. There is pretty much 1 universal standard for time. Seconds, minutes, hours. You don't see some metric time split into base 10.

by Anonymous 2 days ago

"made up"? In what sense? I will agree that an hour didn't have to be EXACTLY 1/24 of a day, but a day was going to get divided into smaller pieces, and that division into smaller, etc. and an hour is pretty close to the right amount of time for quite a lot of the things that humans do, and a minute sure is a handy sized division, as is a second. If you mind-wiped all of humanity back into the stone age I bet they would divide up the day in a fashion quite similar to how it is now.

by Longjumping-Day4493 2 days ago

Fun Fact: Hours were not always 1/24t of the day. The Romans had 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, every day. The length of those hours varied seasonally.

by Better-Nose 2 days ago

I think if we redesigned the time system now, it would be base 10 instead of base 60 (which by the way stems from the ancient Sumerians, and is based on counting with your hands. You touch each of the three parts of four fingers with your thumb, making twelve. Each time you do that, you raise a finger of your other hand, making 60)

by Educational_Try 2 days ago

Time is a measurement of motion.

by Demario06 2 days ago

so, fun fact: it didn't. Sort of. Up until the late 1800s, locations would standardize to their local solar mean time, so if you traveled to a different city and you were rich enough to have a watch, your watch would be out of sync. This wasn't really a problem though, because traveling far enough to be wildly out of sync would take days or weeks, and you'd be adjusting your watch along the way. But then we started using trains, and they traveled fast enough and kept to timetables where we needed the precision. In the US, time zones were standardized by consolidating local solar times, but global synchronization didn't really happen until the BBC started broadcasting the Greenwich Time Signal in 1924. So, the sun played a part of getting everybody roughly close (and standardizing passages of time), but was actually the cause of everywhere being *out* of sync until we used radio waves. Also, we didn't have a worldwide standard of synchronized time until UTC in 1963. I'd say OP is right, it's impressive that we were able to synchronize time globally.

by jace81 2 days ago

OP is talking about UTC.

by Afraid_Hunt 2 days ago

Fun fact: China has synchronized its time across it's entirety. All the same time zone, despite being 5000km East to West

by MediumCultural 2 days ago

That isn't why we have leap seconds

by Anonymous 2 days ago

there probably is an alternative universe where you enter different calendars and time systems depending on the country. in countries that are stubborn, conservative or proud of their history they refuse to change it. you have complicated converters installed in your phone apps and hardcoded into computers. and various tricks to calculate it in your mind

by Anonymous 2 days ago

There are. There's two or more calendars in use concurrently.

by Zealousideal-Plan 2 days ago

Hours? Minutes? Seconds? Sure. Years?… takes long drag of cigarette Forgettabouttit.

by Electronic_Slice 2 days ago