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by plesner
713 days ago
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It makes a lot of sense to not care about a slight amount of drift. But that already exists: that's what TAI is. Why make UTC into another TAI just slightly offset? Why not just switch to TAI? Or, if the 37 second difference between UTC and TAI is the problem they can make a new TAI-minus-37. What makes no sense is taking something useful, UTC, and redefining it out of existence. Then what time do you use if you really do care about drift? Do we invent a new UTC? |
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That would be great.
> Then what time do you use if you really do care about drift?
Nobody uses UTC because they want to know where the Sun is to the nearest second. People who actually need to care about variations in the Earth's rotation speed (e.g. astronomers) already need far fancier stuff than just UTC. People use UTC because someone else made a mistake and decided they should use UTC, like a government standard, or an operating system vendor, or whatever. Unfortunately the best way to correct all those millions of mistakes is to redefine UTC rather than convince everyone in the world to simultaneously switch to TAI.
> taking something useful, UTC, and redefining it out of existence
I question that UTC is useful. What utility does it have over TAI, outside of interoperability with other people who are using UTC? Again, anyone who actually needs to care about Earth rotation speed changes already needs to use something better than plain UTC, and my argument in my original comment is that drift that is small on a scale of a human lifetime is not an actual problem for anyone alive today or in the future.