[burfog]

UT1 is a disaster for many purposes. It is, quite simply, a measure of the Earth's current angle in space. This is ideal for pointing an Earth-based telescope. Trouble is, we can't reliably predict how fast this will tick. You may think leap seconds are bad, but how about if you simply can't know the current time without having a current measurement of the position of quasars in the sky? The length of a second isn't even constant.

TAI matches up with the atomic second, and UTC is that plus enough leap seconds to approximate UT1.

It all sucks, but this is reality. You can't fix reality. You'd have to tell the Earth to obey an atomic clock.

[freeflight]

> It all sucks, but this is reality. You can't fix reality. You'd have to tell the Earth to obey an atomic clock.

The question might be super naive, but I wonder how useful/workable a time-system would be that's completely decoupled from celestial body movements? Isn't Swatch Internet Time something like that?

Gonna be really interesting once humanity becomes interplanetary or even interstellar. Will we have whole different calendars and time zones for different planets and solar systems?

[antepodius]

You'd imagine an internet time (or civilisation time) used for timekeeping in interplanetary protocols, synced (relatively) well to Earth- or wherever the centre of human Civilisation ends up being. Because clock speed changes due to relativity, your Civilisation Time counter would have to take into account your position and velocity relative to earth to not slip- while syncing often enough to counteract This way you can have relatively stable time measurement, even when time strictly speaking passes faster for some computers than others.

Time slows down as you go faster. The people leaving earth are the ones accelerating, so they're the ones who travel faster into the future- less time passes for them. If we colonise stars around us, the people going to the further stars (assume all ships leave from earth) will lose more time: Civilisation Time will be ahead of the time they measure on their regular clocks.

Maybe we could use pulsars as clocks? I think they pulse pretty regularly.