| No. UTC with leap seconds isn't "reality" except in the sense that some of those awful scripted "reality TV" shows are reality. It's a confection, and it's annoying so there's no real argument for it beyond "That's what we've always done" which is a pretty dubious rationale for anything, but even more so when it's been like that for less than a normal human lifespan. Leap seconds won't even be like the automobile, let alone newspapers or hotdogs, they're a fleeting idea we thought might be good, now we realise it's not good, so bye bye. There are two "realities" here. TAI is the monotonically increasing "Seconds are the same length and happen in order" clock time that it turns out well suits a lot of human enterprises. The exact details have been worked out pretty well. A Day in TAI is 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 SI seconds, always, forever. UT1 is a descendant of "Solar time" now based on the Earth's rotational angle. A Day in UT1 is the full rotation, how long that is in SI seconds varies very slightly and arbitrarily. UTC wants to have the steady monotonicity of TAI except it wants to match UT1's days exactly, this is not a thing, so the "leap seconds" are conjured to kludge it. This kludge is what's going away, it's not part of "reality" it's a kludge to try to fit a square peg in a round hole and we're giving up the kludge. It has been a long time since humans worked purely from direct observation of the "solar time" or rotation. Once the clock gets invented, so millennia ago, that's out and humans are measuring (albeit not very precisely at first) what we now call TAI. Giving up leap seconds is us finally accepting that while UT1 is astronomically interesting, it's not actually a sensible basis for day to day living. |
Weeks aren't reality. Timezones aren't reality. Julian/Gregorian calendar months aren't reality. But they are essential.
Calendars, centralised time, and timezones drive coordinated human socialisation and commerce, increasing the wealth of all nations.
Countries have switched timezones so that their "work day" matches another more prosperous country's "work day"
Humans want, and have always wanted, a compromise between their activities, and the unalterable reality of nature. We have "daylight savings time" because if we say "work is between 9AM and 5PM", that allows for the synchronised commerce - you can phone another business at 9AM because you both start work at 9AM, and 9AM = 9AM for both of you. But the reality is that in the winter months, everyone is going to work or leaving work in darkness, with no daylight time for socialisation. So you shift your entire country's (or state's) offset from an absolute clock, to turn "9AM to 5PM" into "8AM to 4PM" without actually stating that, because if businesses started varying their hours, they'd desync completely and you'd never get business done again.
It hasn't been that long since we accepted centralised time, only really since the invention of railways, and especially since the invention of the telegraph. Prior to that, local solar time ruled. Bram Stoker was particulary upset that Ireland was 25 minutes out of alignment with Great Britain (Dublin Mean Time vs Greenwich Mean Time), in his view Ireland was missing out on a lot of trade [0]
I don't think we're going to move to a time source that will slowly desync us from nature. If we liked being desynced from nature, we've have ditched DST by now - we haven't. And we also haven't gone entirely back to nature and made it 9:30 in Dublin when it's 9:55 in London. I think we're going to remain on this middle path - fudging the mixture of atomic time and alignment with solar time - for the rest of our days on this planet.
[0] https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/turning-back-the-economic-c...