Bigger problem of 1970 epoch is that the 1970-1972 period was confusing time for UTC; having the epoch at 1972 would be arguably much cleaner Fun excerpt from

Bigger problem of 1970 epoch is that the 1970-1972 period was confusing time for UTC; having the epoch at 1972 would be arguably much cleaner Fun excerpt from Wikipedia: > As an intermediate step at the end of 1971, there was a final irregular jump of exactly 0.107758 TAI seconds, making the total of all the small time steps and frequency shifts in UTC or TAI during 1958–1971 exactly ten seconds, so that 1 January 1972 00:00:00 UTC was 1 January 1972 00:00:10 TAI exactly, and a whole number of seconds thereafter. At the same time, the tick rate of UTC was changed to exactly match TAI. I'll leave it as exercise to the reader to think of all the implications of whatever timesteps and tickrate shifts that happened pre-1972.