Anyone who has successfully "got away from it all" will know that time is, to a degree, a social construct designed to coordinate and organize cities and the city-folk that operate them.
The measuring of the time is not set in stone: daylight saving time is a controversial convention and the hours of the day people expect to work or be served are constantly changing. Many localities, including my own, have recently adjusted their daylight saving schedule, attempting to find the lifestyle sweet spot for our travel across the fourth dimension.
Energy Saving Time
You might have caught the news that a study at UC Santa Barbara recently found that Daylight Saving Time does not save energy (costs) in the state of Indiana, USA.
Since only some counties in Indiana observe Daylight Saving Time, but all counties have a similar enough sunrise, sunset and temperature pattern to be scientifically comparable, the state is a natural experiment. Laura Grant and Matthew Kotchen at UC Santa Barbara examined power consumption levels and bills across counties that observe DST and compared them to counties that do not.
The assumption made about DST is that by bringing normal waking hours forward (thereby extending evening daylight), society will reduce its demand for energy, enjoying sunlight instead of electric lighting.
Kotchen says that when DST was introduced by Benjamin Franklin, he didn't foresee air conditioners being used later into long, warm evenings. As a result of this extended use of air conditioning, the study found that counties that observed daylight saving time actually used between 1 and 4 percent more electricity than counties that did not.
There's a big call to make here: how can we reduce the power consumption of these air conditioners and lights, and increase the degree to which our power is generated by renewable resources, such that running an air conditioner is not a Bad Thing? Would it be more elegant, in the short term, to abandon DST or to somehow discourage air conditioning?
Open 24 Hours
The issue of what hours we spend awake is complicated by a significant and recent social change. Late last century there was a movement in cities towards round-the-clock availability that, ten years on, seems to be here to stay. 24 hour availability is now an integral component of globalisation and international business.
While no city is always-open, the trend to stay open longer is continuing, and hours are generally getting later for most retail and services. Increasingly, office and IT workers are expected to be "available" around the clock, or work at flexible or irregular times.
In New Zealand, an IT workers market has opened for out-sourced phone-based technical support for American companies. Supermarkets, service stations, and many other services remain open to serve the hospital workers, night-life adventurers, newspaper writers, security guards and other shift working industries.
Of course, the internet is lively 24 hours a day.
In 1999, a company called Urbanfetch (archive.org link) operated a 24-hour ordering and 1-hour bicycle delivery service for a variety of meals, snacks, entertainment and gifts in Manhattan and London. The service went out of business the next year (lesson: you can't compete on prices for physical DVDs while offering free delivery), but it was the epitome of 24 hour living in the dot-com era. Urbanfetch was deliberately novel, but the conditions for its success are not difficult to imagine.
Open 28 Hours
While there isn't an alternative sleeping pattern that has enjoyed massive adoption (correct me if I'm wrong), there are various ways to arrange a day or a week for human habitation.
One of these ideas is the 28 Hour Day.
Under the 28 Hour Day system, the current week would remain at exactly 168 hours. (24x7=168) However, this 168 hour period would be divided into six 28-hour days rather than 7 24-hour days.http://www.dbeat.com/28/
Six days means a reduction in transport requirements (longer work or study days), and more variety of day/night time spent awake. Its proponents say that they get more done, feel more rested, and synchronise with their natural sleeping patterns better.
When Harvard University experimented the 28 hour day on human subjects they found that the subjects adapted their waking and sleeping patterns to the alternative day but their hormones continued to work on a 24 hour, 11 minute cycle.
The ten hour day
The main argument against decimalisation of time is that the current 60/60/24/7/356 system is already practised around the globe. But an eventual change makes sense: as currency, space and other measurements turn decimal, why shouldn't time follow?
Decimalisation of time means longer hours, such that ten hours fill a day. Each would be broken in to ten minutes, each of which was ten seconds.
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There's no question that being awake during daylight is the best use of solar energy we can make. But as an increasingly global world calls for globally compatible time, let's be open to what's possible.
Obligatory link: Check out the Long Now, which was founded in 01996.
The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
Images: Thanks to Flickr/Rustybrick and Flickr/simpologist!
