"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia"
Charles Schulz
Lately I have been pondering the mysteries of the International Date Line. At some magical moment in the evening while I'm flying over the Pacific on Monday, August 2 I will cross an imaginary line on the globe and all of a sudden it will be the same time on Tuesday, August 3. Goodbye Monday. Hello Tuesday. On my way back from New Zealand, I will leave Auckland at 1PM on Saturday, August 21 and arrive in L.A. at 6:30AM on Saturday, August 21. I will forever find the international date line a celestial wonder.
Time-travel was on everyone's mind when Magellan's voyage, having been the first to successfully circumnavigate the globe, landed in Portuguese territory on a Wednesday, while, much to their consternation, everyone there stubbornly insisted that it was Thursday. Later, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, "being much disquieted and trobled with that care," figured out the answer and wrote it all up for Pope Adrian VI, concluding that if one sailed west, chasing the sun, the days would be a tiny bit longer and by the time you got all the way around you would have burned up a whole extra day, as Magellan's voyage had. What was Wednesday to you would be Thursday to everyone else. Pietro felt this to be very profound but resolved to "Let Philosophers more deeply discusse this matter" in the future.1
Curiously enough, the idea of marking a line on the globe to delimit "today" and "tomorrow" was thought up long before people started circumnavigating the globe. Since the 12th century Jewish rabbis have debated the placement of such a line so that righteous Jews living in all corners of the globe could observe sabbath on the appropriate day. The question of how should one observe the sabbath when traveling over the date line on a Friday-Saturday or Saturday-Sunday transition is even more thorny.2 It's lucky we travel on a Monday.
The civil date line observed by most of the world zigzags through the Pacific Ocean, careening left and right to avoid hitting land or splitting up island chains. It is placed where it is because presumably no one would want to live somewhere where it is today on one side of your home but tomorrow on the other side.
But wouldn't it be rather nice to live in just such a place? If your house was split by the date line, you could have the power of the date line always at your disposal. Anytime you were having a bad day you could just hop across the imaginary line and it would be tomorrow. Same time, just the next day. And if one sunrise wasn't good enough for you that morning, you could hop back across the imaginary line and hit "repeat." And if you made a mistake on that morning, could you get another chance to make things right? Cross the line, rewind, and do it all over again?
1. A History of the International Date Line
2. A Traveler's Guide to the International Date Line
Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License by user Jailbird.
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