Lifeboat Foundation

If we are to successfully wend our way through the thicket of existential risks facing humanity, we need to be on top of our game…

Daylight savings time was invented by postal worker George V. Hudson, who argued it would reduce the time that people sleep when the sun is up, saving energy by lessening the use of electric lights. Hudson’s proposal was published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1895. This strange system has since taken hold worldwide, depriving millions of a much-needed hour of sleep in the Spring by moving clocks ahead, and stingily giving it back again in the Fall by repeating an hour (2:00 – 2:59:59 a.m. happens twice, one Sunday morning a year in much of the US). As the saying goes, “Spring forward, Fall back.”

Alas, issues with daylight savings time abound, while any energy-saving benefits in the modern world are unclear. Those readers who have or work with young children can often see the strain on them. Adults often feel it too, but generally suck it up rather than be late for work. Clocks also need to be tediously reset (alternatively, just adjust the stated time mentally by an hour for 6 months until the clock is right again). A better solution is smart clocks that adjust automatically, which is increasingly the situation, as on your computer. Current smart clock technology is the way to go, but is currently a mere shadow of where it could end up – as we will see below.

As the popular phrase goes, “Something should be done about it!”

It is axiomatic, if not tautological, that the human organism works best – most efficiently, with maximum health and energy – under optimal conditions. We, like many organisms, are naturally tuned to a 24-hour cycle. Many studies, for example, have shown that working odd hours has negative effects on health and other things. Thus, scheduling life around an optimal schedule would, obviously, be a good thing for both individuals and society as a whole. This optimal schedule is strongly influenced by the time of sunrise because, as any jet-lagged traveler will attest, the human biological clock strives to synchronize with the natural day-night rhythm of the Earth. The optimal schedule is therefore not in lockstep with clock time, but with daylight times, which vary continuously throughout the year. While changing the clock twice a year to account for daylight savings time is decidedly unnatural, rigidly adhering to a consistent 24-hour clock cycle year round is also unnatural even without the daylight savings time adjustments. The problem goes deeper than just daylight savings time. The problem is the iron-fisted rule of clocks as they presently exist.

As noted earlier, something should be done. Here’s what.

What time we get up in the morning, what time work starts, school starts, etc., should be pegged to sunrise, and thus should typically change by a matter of a minute or a few (in terms of current time-keeping) from day to day. Of course, it would be crazy to have to consult multiple detailed calendars to know whether the office opens tomorrow this morning at 7:17 a.m. or 7:19 a.m., whether the kid’s school bell rings at at 8:03 a.m. or 8:06 a.m., etc., etc. The natural solution is for the school bell to ring at 8:00 a.m., but for the clock to decide it is 8:00 a.m. a set, constant amount of time after sunrise, no matter what time our current, anachronistically rigid clocks would think that is. For example, the current daylight savings time rules should be abrogated and replaced with a rule that when the sun rises, it is 6:00 a.m.

This strategy, sensible as it is, does lead to a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out. One is that when it is 6:00 a.m. at your home, it won’t be exactly 6:00 a.m. at your workplace or the local grade school. Every location on Earth will have its own time zone! But so what? You will learn what time you need to leave in the morning just as easily as you do now, even if your workplace time is a minute later or earlier than your home time. No big deal. The hard part is building clocks that can actually figure out what time they should show. But this is the computer age. All you need is for clocks to know where they are (whether with a GPS receiver, or by you typing in the latitude and longitude obtained from your home papers or from Google maps, or whatever), and software to compute from that and the date the proper time for the clock to show. Appointments for telephone conversations or conference calls among widely separated individuals can likewise be coordinated by automatic conversions among participants’ times mediated by currently crude, but soon more sophisticated event scheduling software like doodle.com and Google calendar. Long distance travelers would have itineraries too complicated for humans to reliably determine to the minute, but we are in the computer age, and computers simply need to step up to the plate and take care of that. We’re certainly not talking about anything beyond the ability of current technology here.

The benefits include a happier, healthier, more productive – and less tired – society.