4 ms·
wouldn't dropping leap seconds result in noon during the night after a while?
by gr3yh47 11y ago
wouldn't dropping leap seconds result in noon during the night after a while?
- iopq 11y agoYes, after thousands of years. What percentage of humans will still be living on Earth by the time that happens?
- towelguy 11y agoI expect less than 100%
- knodi123 11y agobold guess, since it's already < 100%
- gweinberg 11y agoWhere else are they living? People visit the ISS, but they don't really live there.
- bashinator 11y agoThey're on the Earth, but they're not living.
- knodi123 11y agodon't live there? they receive mail, store clothes, and coordinate bathroom time... buddy, you're only visiting earth for a precious handful of years
- Zikes 11y agoI have no idea how often leap seconds occur, but if we were to say that there should be one leap second every year and we instead ignored them, it would take 43,200 years before that happened. It would take 60 years of skipping yearly leap seconds before we saw even a 1 minute offset.
- tfinniga 11y agoWikipedia says that we've had 26 leap seconds since 1972, or about 0.6 seconds per year.
- joshyeager 11y agoSome leap seconds are negative, so the total change since 1972 is less than 26 seconds.
- ubernostrum 11y agoTAI (weighted average of atomic clocks, correcting for relativistic effects due to altitude) is the basis for UTC, and is currently 35 seconds ahead of UTC. Prior to 1972, UTC and TAI used different definitions of a second (UTC used a definition based on positions of celestial bodies while TAI used a definition based on the hyperfine transition of cesium, and the two were periodically manually "stepped" back into sync). As of 1972 they use the same definition of the second (TAI's definition, which is also the SI definition), and a final "step" was applied to cause the difference in the two times to be an integer number of TAI seconds. That created an offset of 10 seconds, which has since grown with the addition of 25 (and soon to be 26) positive and zero negative leap seconds to UTC.
- gpvos 11y agoThe rotation of the Earth is slowing down, and this slowing down is expected to accelerate in the future. So in several thousand years, we will need multiple leap seconds per day to keep up. Whether we should take this into account now is the question, though.
- tzs 11y ago> [...] it would take 43,200 years before that happened. That's how long for noon to end up at midnight. Noon would occur at night after only around 22000 years (I'm being fuzzy because people may not all agree on what night means).