Together with astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry from Johns Hopkins, he's proposed a new type of calendar that remains exactly the same, year in year out, forever.
Hanke is not stranger to radical ideas about how we handle time. So, people in Atlanta who normally rise at 6am would rise at 11 under this hypothetical." "So, if sunrise was at 6 am in Atlanta on Eastern Standard Time, it would change to 11 am GMT. Hanke, from the Johns Hopkins University in the US, told Vassileva at CNN. Everyone in the world would be reading the same time on their watches at the same moment," applied economist Steve H. "As for daily life, nothing would change very much, except one big thing. In an effort to reconcile the literally hundreds of different time zones adhered to around the world, says Vassileva, "nations agreed to have 24 time zones, each one 15 degrees wide, based on the Greenwich Meridian in London."īut is it time to think about reducing the number of timezones further? What about if we all just lived according to a single universal time zone, like pilots do? We'd still get up in the morning, go to work, and go to bed at night, but we'd all be living off the same clocks. The global time zones we currently set our lives to were first set up at the Meridian Conference in 1883. And the real kicker is it's all completely arbitrary anyway. "Rather than forcing everyone to get up earlier, it may make more sense to make everyone get up later."Īnd a study that came out in 2015 found that unhealthy people tend to struggle through the transition into daylight saving worse than their healthier counterparts. "There is already evidence that students who have to go to school at 7.30 am perform worse than matched peers who start at 8.30 am because (it is thought) they are fighting their circadian rhythm," Gari Clifford, an expert on sleep disorders at Emory University in the US, told Ralitsa Vassileva at CNN. When we ignore that very basic mechanism, and force our bodies to function according to arbitrary times, we're risking our health, researchers are finding. When daylight hits, we receive a dose of hormones to wake us up, when it gets dark, our bodies produce hormones to calm us down and make us sleepy. They're ruled by an internal biological, or circadian, clock that's ruled by the presence and absence of daylight. Put simply - our bodies don't know what hour it is, they don't know what day it is. But recently, the discussion has been a bit different, because scientists are finding more and more evidence to suggest that our health is suffering because of it.