Earth Time

To venture away from the topic of our lives in LA and of Tuckerian dopplegangers a bit -- and to stall while we all eagerly await Diana's first blog post and the juicy wedding tidbits that promises -- I'd like to share some thoughts that came to me after a surprisingly controversial / engaging Tweet.

Last night, after a day where I was trying to contact some potential Google Lunar X PRIZE teams in a variety of time zones, I tossed off a quick tweet without much thought:

With Google Lunar X PRIZE teams all over the world, timezones are pretty annoying things. Can we all just adopt Earth Time or something?

Well, that one little tweet I tossed off last night sure garnered a lot of attention. I got something like 8 public replies, 1 or 2 private replies, and one lengthy, offline email. Not something I expected at all! A number of those replies were similar--people who hadn't quite understood the background of my post was frustration with the fact that not everyone was awake and at work at the same times I am, and thought instead that I simply was aware of UTC / Zulu time or other similar universal standards for time telling. Another response, from a proper Manx gentleman, jokingly told me that a universal timezone had been tried before (the British with Greenwich Mean Time).

But the detailed email was driving at a deeper question. It came from a friend who is just polishing off a PhD in Informatics, and who is highly interested in the scientific study of how large and/or distributed groups work together. He's done a lot of cool research at a number of impressive places, and is thinking forward to what he'll do after his thesis defense in May. He asked me:

What makes you think adopting Earth Time would solve the problem(s) you imply in your tweet? You are as globally-working a person as anyone and this issue has long been a bit intractable, so I'm interested in any thoughts you might have about it. ... Time zones have always represented a tension between local needs and global needs for interaction and coordination. The obvious problem with a single Earth Time is that it reifies 1-3 zones' inhabitants'
"normal" workdays and the other 35 or so have to adapt their work to it. One approach might be to reify the time zone that is least populated so as to inconvenience the most people more or less equally. Hard to sell that one, though. Another option is Unix Epoch Time, but non-geeks won't get it. ... However, I do think the increasing ubiquity of mobile and computational infrastructures/services can afford increasing temporal fluidity in our choices about our interactions with others ... but I'm not yet sure of how the problem might be addressed.

I thought it was a pretty interesting question, so I took advantage of a few minutes to come up with a response and some thoughts of my own about how the issue of time and timezones impacts me through my job.

In reality, I find the issue of time zones and global dispersion of our various teams / partners (see graphic at right, click to enlarge) to be a minor annoyance, not a major problem. The annoyance level has increased slightly now that I live out in LA--though that could be related to the fact that I now have to deal with a 3 hour time difference when talking to my family in addition to the time differences I have to deal with at work.

Mainly, though, the issue of time zones comes into play in conjunction with my ethical obligation to try to provide an equivalent level of service to a roster of teams that spans a wide range of longitudes. Seeking to provide a totally level playing field is probably impossible for a lot of reasons--for instance, budgetary concerns will also make us tempted to hold events such as team summits here in the USA, and our brand name and network of contents are far better here in US than abroad, especially in non-English speaking languages. That's something we and our teams have accepted and are now more or less comfortable with dealing with. But for some reason, it is much more frustrating to deal with this uneven playing field when we are arranging things like telephone calls, web seminars, and other 'virtual world' events--it is less acceptable to have a 'longitude bias,' but the longitude bias still makes planning things very, very difficult.

Again, this is likely compounded by factors like language barriers, common attendance of public events, and (least important, in my experience) cultural differences. But I seem to inevitably develop a closer working relationship with teams here in North America than I do with teams in Europe, and closer for European teams than for Asian teams. Our team from China and one of our two teams from Malaysia remain the only GLXP teams I have not yet met in person, so I haven't had that relationship-building experience--and both those teams and I have the knowledge that any telephone communication will by necessity need to be planned in advance and, even with advance planning, will be quite inconvenient for one of us.

Having everyone on the planet operate on a single time zone--or maybe even two or three time zones with a total separation of no more than ~6 hours, to ensure some level of work-day overlap--would potentially remove a big part of this latitude bias. However (and here's where we leave observations of personal experience and enter full on amateur sociology hour), I'd expect that the concurrent issue of forcing some longitudinal bands of people to operate essentially nocturnally would create much larger problems than those such a solution would alleviate. Still, I wonder if some better solution is necessary / inevitable. We're already starting to see a level of public discourse about eliminating day light savings time (a custom which, by the way, shows people's willingness and ability to adapt to a system where the noon of public record is divorced from astronomical local noon)--at least I certainly saw many more stories about that this year than in any previous.

I wonder which would be a greater driver towards a radically new time system: an increasingly flat world (more global economies, more multi-national corporations, more instantaneous communications) or a situation where we have a significant human presence off-planet. In the distant future, if we take as an assumption that there will be human colonies in a variety of orbits around a variety of stars, will residents of the Earth be more likely to accept a time system that pays little attention to one's longitude? Another potential game-changer, I'd imagine, would be extremely rapid transportation systems like suborbital point-to-point or, to get a bit more fanciful, teleportation. If our transportation infrastructure can get me from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes--but I have to deal with the world's worst case of jet lag, how does that function? How will we adopt to increase our efficiencies to deal with that new capacity?

A note for fellow geeks: yes, the clock pictured above is one of John Harrison's the Longitude Prize winners.