damn. some good points in here. I stand corrected.

All of the arguments seem to assume you have today's current tools and knowledge at your disposal, just with timezones abolished. This is clearly not what would happen. The real answer to "What time is it there?" without timezones would be the same exact thing, you google "what time of day is 4:25 in australia?" and google would tell you something like, "it's equivalent to 8:00 where you are"

That doesn’t help with the day/date mismatch. Switching everyone to UTC for absolutely everything solves a few problems (international meeting scheduling confusion, cranky programmers) and creates huge problems for almost everything else. Not to mention that access to technology like that is not universal.

Haven't you just then re-created time zones?

Yes, but with none of the inconsistencies.

For many people the standard communication medium nowadays is not a voice call but an asynchronous chat message. I wouldn't bother looking up the time in Melbourne, I'd just send a WhatsApp message. Uncle Steve can reply at his convenience.

Bare in mind that just because Uncle Steve is awake that it is not necessarily convenient for him. In the scenario he likes to stay in bed a bit later. This is no problem if you simply send him a message. No need for any lookups or actuarial tables or astronomical calculations whatsoever. If we want to voice chat we can do so after he has responded to the asynchronous chat message.

Bare in mind that the answer to "what time in it" post timezones would be "mid-morning", or "late evening" or "noon". ie. conveying the information you actually need.