Solar sails? Dyson sphere? Do we need to run in the same direction in a coordinated fashion?
Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#12if we mobilized a whole-of-society effort to build millions of rocket engines and fired them year round, it'd only take a few hundred years to get this done
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#13I agree, moving the earth's axis with respect to the sun seems actually feasible compared to getting a standards body to agree on coordinated change.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#14The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
Keeping a calendar is fairly simple (requires knowing writing). Observing which day the solstice is on is also fairly simple (requires a sundial: the shortest/longest shadow at noon are the solstices. If you're in the tropics just observe when the sun passes directly overhead instead). Observing that the solstice moves by a day every 4 years isn't too hard by analyzing those observations.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#15If we’re changing unix time we should probably do something about the year 2038 problem. It’ll not be nearly as fun as new years in 2000.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#16The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
That's blowing your mind because the currently implicitly or mindlessly acknowledged understanding by the majority of people is that today is the peak of human's evolution. Majority thinks that they inherently and collectively know everything better in relation to what our ancestors knew, especially compared to those thousands of years ago. But how do you really know. Because they had no iPhones and cars? Development of technical tools, yeah there we _might_ well be on the peak, but that doesn't really cover all aspects of actually _understanding_ our earth and the universe.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#17If you have problem with Unix time you are probably using it wrong. It is monotonically rising timer that increments every second. That's it. It doesn't care about leap second, leap years or any of the orbits.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#18The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
This was known, to greater precision, a century before Julius Caesar:
https://csuitemind.com/quotes/i-have-composed-a-book-on-the-...
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#19If you have problem with Unix time you are probably using it wrong. It is monotonically rising timer that increments every second. That's it. It doesn't care about leap second, leap years or any of the orbits.
wrong. unix time is discontinuous around leap seconds.
If you think you have no problems with unix time, it's because you never noticed them.
TAI is what you want.
Re: Unix Time and a Modest Proposal
#20The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while. This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
They probably could measure summer solstices, and count the days between 4 of them, and they got 1461. They could've measured 1461 days -43 minutes, and be more precise, if they had wanted. Julius Caesar was as short-sighted as most software developers today, and he was only planning for like 40 years (that's already more than 7 hours off) but not much more.