| ▲ | jcranmer 4 hours ago |
| TL;DR: No more leap seconds. The replacement will not be leap minutes but leap hours. |
|
| ▲ | layer8 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| …the next which is expected in roughly a 1000 years: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/futuredelt.svg |
| |
|
| ▲ | krunck 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Am I wrong in interpreting this as just pushing the problem (divergence between International Atomic Time and the rotational speed of the earth) 100 years in the future? |
| |
| ▲ | hnuser123456 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This essentially means being less anal about ensuring the earth has the exact same clock time at the exact same earth-sun-relative rotational position. Turns out the earth spins up and slows down semi-randomly with a magnitude big enough to require positive or negative leap seconds every few years, and it's just not worth the effort. Leap minutes might only be needed around every 100 years, but that would still be annoying, so they dropped all the way to leap hours, probably not needed for thousands of years. As long as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the afternoon, that saves on a lot of frequent minor adjustments. Timezones are already an hour wide anyways, and the sun isn't in the same spot when you're on the western vs eastern edges. Sure, you could also run a relativistic simulation of the solar system, galaxy, and cosmos to establish a more monotonic clock and calendar independent of imperfect orbital parameters, but that's a bit much for discerning whether or not it's lunchtime. | | | |
| ▲ | layer8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Several hundred years at least (see my sibling comment). And in all likelihood this will be handled by shifting the time zones by an hour, or possibly by omitting one DST adjustment in spring. In the very far future, leap seconds would become inadequate anyway, as you’d have to insert them every month, then every week, then every day, due to the deceleration of Earth’s rotation. | | |
| ▲ | andy81 an hour ago | parent [-] | | If DST is still around in 1000 years, please drop my brain-jar in front of a spacebus. Leap seconds never did me any harm but DST is a constant menace, adding complexity everywhere. |
| |
| ▲ | dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | in 100 years the Sun will be inside the Dyson sphere, so there will be no need for further solar time adjustment |
|
|
| ▲ | throw0101c 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > The replacement will not be leap minutes but leap hours. People have a hard time with leap years, which happen regularly every four years, so I'm curious to know how well a "one-off" event at a basically random time in the future will work. |
| |
| ▲ | ameliaquining an hour ago | parent [-] | | The actual rationale here is that it's not worth trying to figure out whether a hypothetical leap hour in a thousand years would be worth it, or how to pull it off if so, because no advance preparation for that scenario that we can do today has enough value to outweigh our ignorance of what the world will look like then. If they decide not to do it, they can just change the rules again; there'll be plenty of advance notice. |
|
