A Timeless World

[RainMan]

I like presenting myself with "What-if's" from time to time.

 

What if everyone the world over, at the same time, realized there were no more clocks or timepieces? Not even the one you see in the lower right hand corner of your computer? They all just went "poof" and vanished into thin air?

 

How well, or badly, do you think society would function without the aid of a man-made device to tell us when we should be doing something?  

[Turtle]

I like presenting myself with "What-if's" from time to time.

 

What if everyone the world over, at the same time, realized there were no more clocks or timepieces? Not even the one you see in the lower right hand corner of your computer? They all just went "poof" and vanished into thin air?

 

How well, or badly, do you think society would function without the aid of a man-made device to tell us when we should be doing something?

I think locally -within a 15º time zone or 2- society would function well enough using sunrise/sunset. But across multiple time zones, chaos would ensue. No navigation, no coordinated transportation (planes& trains), and no stock exchanges, to name just a few problems that come to mind.

[Buffy]

One of my cousins was talking the other night about how on her regular walks around a nearby lake, she'd noticed how the ducks do different things at different times of the day like clockwork. 

 

There definitely seems to be an in-built sense of time among most medium-to-high-order animals, and our species has not been depending on clocks long enough for it to have been selected out of our DNA. Moreover our brains can be utilized to the point where most people could get the time right to probably to an hour or so as long as we kept track of the calendar and knew the sun's behavior at our latitude.

 

That's basically where humans were from about 5000 years ago up to about 500 years ago when clocks became public works. Not much changed with that advent for us as individuals, because we already knew roughly what time it was anyway. But what the town clock with bells did is that it allowed *society* to start being able to coordinate activities at the hour-level of granularity (with approximations of "half" and "quarter" being relatively easy to use), and created notions such as "pay by the hour," and industrialization really was enabled as much by the clock as by other scientific and manufacturing advances.

 

It was industry though that really drove integration of clocks: Turtle mentions trains which of course single-handedly forced the introduction of time zones and timing of schedules down to minutes. So much of the technology of the industrial and information revolutions has depended on increasing accuracy and coordination of time down to the accuracy of atomic clocks.

 

It was only in the 20th century though when the common man actually got his own portable clock (luxuries for the rich for the couple hundred years before), and that allowed society to start really scheduling *human* activities down to the minute. But an interesting thing has occurred: although planes may be timed down to the minute, most people's appointments (business, doctors, etc.) all have pretty much stuck at the half-/quarter-hour level of granularity: There's too much uncertainty to our daily lives to be able to guess what we can do when at much of a lower level, and polite society simply dictates "be there in that quarter hour before the appointed time, but people understand if you're a few minutes late."

 

So really we as organisms are working at the same level we have since the pre-industrial age, and most likely that if the clocks disappeared, the technology that depends on them would go too (in violent agreement with Turtle here).

 

I'm pretty sure we'd still be having lunch around noon, though.

 

 

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save, :phones:

Buffy

[arissa]

I think many people would show what kind of person they are. I am sure I would sleep in for a while but at some point my body would catch up with my mind and realize when it is time to wake up and when it is time to do certain things. Some people need rules in order to get by, others don't.