I don't think we can predict ahead of time whether we'll need a leap second or not
If the question is "why bother syncing time to Earth's orbit around the sun at all", I don't have a good answer for that except at this point, it's tradition.
I don't think we can predict ahead of time whether we'll need a leap second or not
If the question is "why bother syncing time to Earth's orbit around the sun at all", I don't have a good answer for that except at this point, it's tradition.
We can set some rasterization floor, such as like 3 minutes or something, and live with that.
Correcting for a 3-minute offset every few millenia seems easier than trying to understand all this minutia about wobble and aquifer management and whatever else goes into a leap second.
I'm pretty sure that's the plan. Currently they're legally bound to keep it within 0.9s of solar noon (or something like that) but in 2035 it's changing to +-1 minute, which basically kicks the can down the road for another century or so
I say we let it reach 15 minutes then countries can solve it themselves by shifting timezone by 15 mins. Since making sure solar noon matches noon on the clock, is the point of timezones existing in the first place
> every few millennia
We'll feel awful silly having made any leap seconds if the robots kill us all in the next decade.
More seriously -- all of today's computers and probably all of today's software (not to mention many scientific and governmental institutions) will be gone in 500 years. Does it make sense to plan too far ahead?