[getbak]

The advantages would be minimal. One I can think of would be that you'd know that if you were taking a 7 hour fight that left at 10:00, you'd arrive at your destination at 17:00. Also, if you wanted to watch a live event from somewhere on the other side of the world, you'd know what time it started without converting the time.

The disadvantage to that is that knowing that you're arriving at 17:00 wouldn't have any real meaning to you because if you landed in London at 17:00, it might be late in the daylight hours; but if you landed in Tokyo at 17:00 it would be the middle of the night.


With what we have now, we all know that if we take a flight that's scheduled to land at 08:00 local time, we'll be landing early in the daylight hours.

Also, it would very tough to have any idea what the local schedule would be like. If we went to GMT exclusively, a store that is currently open from 10am to 9pm in Calgary would now be open from 17:00 to 04:00 the next day. The day would change at what is currently 5:00pm in Calgary. The normal 9-5 working day in Calgary would become a 16:00 to 24:00 working day.


With the current system, if I need to talk to someone in Germany, I can look at a world clock and know that if it's 3:00pm in Calgary, it's 11:00pm in Germany, and that tells me all I need to know about whether I should try to make that call now. If there was one world clock, I'd know that it's 22:00 here and in Germany, but I'd have no inherent idea of what that means for the likelihood of being able to make my call.


Right now, no matter where I go in the world, I know that 12:00 is mid-day and 0:00 is mid-night. That's what's important. If we went to one single clock, the local time would no longer have any meaning, so we'd need more information to know anything about when sunrise and sunset will be and when businesses will be open.

The answer to the question "what time is it?" would be greatly simplified, but it would be replaced by the much more complex question, "what does the time mean?"