[gopalv]

> Why don’t we use TAI or GPS time for generic world wide coordinated computer time?

I think that is valid as long as systems are talking to systems, but the interface with the world (when things are happening in the world) is where the solar day or year is still relevant.

I'm sort of joking, but watching Interstellar made me kinda cringe about what interstellar gravity wells is going to do to time-keeping, even if we use something like an atomic clock to keep time.

We will slowly get better at this until we discover something new, but the switch doesn't mean anything until the costs outweigh the change.

And the leap second is going look like 46-45 BCE[1].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD-R35DSSZY

[repsilat]

In some polls I've seen there's plurality support for "permanent 'summer time'". People don't seem to care much that noon in civil time maps exactly to the sun being at its peak.

Leap second drift is super slow, too -- IIRC something like 10 minutes per millennium. If we shift our clocks by an hour in the year 8000 I think that's less disruptive than leap seconds every year or so.

[FredPret]

Keeping our clocks exactly aligned using leap seconds probably makes something like astronavigation easier

[dharmab]

No, it's the other way around. Astronomical observation requires TAI, and leap seconds are cited as a navigational hazard.

[denton-scratch]

GPS time is no use for far in the future (TAI is OK).

Imagine someone 2,000 years in the future, discovering an archive containing exact GPS timestamps for events. There is no reason to suppose that our present GPS system will still exist - so these timestamps won't be much use to them, since they won't know what the present time (their present) is in terms of GPS. The timestamps in the archive will no longer be precise, as far as they're concerned.