Let’s say people can’t agree on the time to go to bed, and each timezone declared war on every other timezone. Who would win in this conflict? What alliances would form, and will there be betrayal? What would the new world order look like with a standard time for everyone?

GMT+8 looks good with the entire population of China on its side. GMT+1 and +2 have large chunks of Europe and Africa and could be quite strong too. The timezones in the east and west coast of the U.S. might also stand a good chance.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    241·
    10 months ago

    Probably China. It’s one nation, full of industry and under a single leadership. They could produce whatever they needed. China is one time zone.

    Next competitor is the slice encompassing a large number of countries in Africa as well as most of western Europe. Huge number of people and industries contained in that slice, but they lack common leadership.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
    131·
    10 months ago

    China’s cheating, it’s all crammed forcefully into one timezone, Beijing’s!
    In far western China in winter, it could be noon and the sun is barely rising over the horizon. Then in summer the sunset might be at around 1am.

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    10 months ago

    Any war with this many aggressors who were all opposed to each other absolutely would just look like everyone killing each other at random. Even without nukes, it would be madness on a scale never before seen, resulting in a quieter, nay sleepier world.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
    7·
    10 months ago

    US and Russia would tear themselves apart internally. That leaves China with the largest functioning army, vs the EU if they can mobilize fast enough

    • pyre@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      they could but wouldn’t. not for moral reasons but because if you end all life companies that own you wouldn’t make any money.

  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipEnglish
    61·
    10 months ago

    It would result in the total collapse of the entire time zone system. Every location would switch to local solar time and the war would be over.

    When those areas need to communicate with each other, they would develop a new global time system that simply counts seconds from a particular moment in time. Sort of like unix time, but with the epoch set to the moment the new system was launched.

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    96·
    10 months ago

    Nah, Europe ain’t shit. I bet the US east coast timezone could beat all of GMT+1 alone even without using nukes.

    Nukes kind of create a conundrum, though, because they’re pretty much the reason why the big powers stopped direct warfare between each other. If China, Europe and the US had an outright war, those nukes would probably start dropping, and then everybody loses, but also, it’s kind of difficult to truly know how good a country is at nuclear warfare. GMT+1 is certainly going to lose this, though, each of the 4 US timezone could probably nuke it into oblivion, especially since e.g. Germany already has US army bases that are equipped with nuked on its own ground. But how many nukes China actually has and how good the US’s missile interception systems are? Who knows, maybe they’re just that much better. Though even if the US were theoretically stronger, they’re divided into 4 timezones, and it’s not a given that they’ll automatically ally with each other, which again gives China a huge advantage.