Cooperative Earth Time

Cooperative Earth Time (CET) is a time system that displays local and global time simultaneously, with no conversion needed to switch between them.

Description
CET is a time system where local and global time interact co-operatively, using the Sun's location with respect to the whole Earth as the global reference. CET enables the simultaneous display of local/global time by defining a standard with the same local time used today, but replacing Greenwich Mean Time with a global time that is equally relevant to everyone, everywhere. The height of the Sun above the Greenwich Observatory (GMT) is irrelevant to, say, someone in San Francisco communicating with someone in Beijing, or anywhere else outside the Greenwich Meridian. But what is meaningful to all is to specify the time of day as where the Sun is overhead on the Earth (at one hour overhead the zone of Tokyo, followed by the zone of Beijing, then the zone of Jakarta, etc). The one particular longitude of the Sun is the same for everyone everywhere as it moves from one zone to the next with the Earth spinning beneath it.

CET labels these 24 zones with 24 letters in sequence, starting with 'A' at the International Dateline. Fifteen minutes after the Sun crosses the Dateline, the global time is A:15, with local time in Sydney being 10:15, almost two hours before their local noon. CET makes a seamless combination of global and local by stating the time as A10:15. At that same moment in San Francisco, the time is A16:15 (or A 4:15pm). One hour later the global time is B:15, with the Sun having moved overhead the zone labeled 'B', followed next by 'C' and so on.

CET is displayed on a conventional analog watch with the clock face labeled with 24 global letter-hours adjacent to the corresponding local hours. They are spiraled twice around with day/night being delineated in white/black. Local time is read like a normal clock, and the global time is read simply by reading the letter that the hour hand is pointing to, selecting the letter in the white region during the day, or the letter in the black region during the night.

A 24-hour clock face for CET shows all local times along with the global time on a North Polar projection of the Earth.

Cooperative Earth Time (CET) eliminates the confusion of GMT, where conversions are required to figure out the time of teleconferences, emails, internet posts, flights or any event that crosses one or more time zones. The internet has woven together a global society, yet current time tags create a confusing situation that forces a translation from the local time in Greenwich, England. The fundamental problem of GMT is that the local time at the Greenwich Meridian is completely irrelevant to anyone interacting outside of that one zone, which happens regularly in global interaction.
Several time standards have been proposed in the effort to overcome this. Systems like Swatch Internet Time and New Earth Time abandon the current system of hours, minutes and seconds. Such global time standards require a complex calculation to convert between global and local time. But since CET uses common hours, minutes and seconds to specify global as well as local time, it is completely compatible with the current system of local time zones.

History
Back in the 1800s, train technology provided a significant increase in mobility. A station platform would have multiple clocks with minute hands set differently because train lines based their time at different towns. Local noon in New York was different than local noon in Boston or Philadelphia. Users conformed to this situation until the invention of time zones. Sanford Fleming's system of dividing the globe into 24 time zones served as the “unification of the minute hand” (with the minute hands at various locations being set to the same minute). Today the internet is the driving force. People interacting across time zones reference multiple clocks, with each hour hand set to a different time. CET serves as the “unification of the hour hand” to overcome the barrier between local and global time. Conversion between them is not required because the translation is built into the design of the clock display.

Sanford Fleming had himself visualized everyone being unified under one “cosmic time”. He invented the system of designating the global hour with letters, thereby avoiding number interference with local times. His idea did not get off the ground because there was no tightly bound global community like that which exists today with internet, cellphones, jet travel and space travel.

CET provides key elements that were missing in clock designs for “cosmic time”, like handling today’s intricacies of Daylight Savings Time.

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