61–70 of 456 posts
> Leap seconds aren’t predictable, because they depend on to Earth’s natural rotation. This is surprising to me. Is the Earth's rotation so arbitrary?
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> Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Why does being out of sync with the Earth's orbit matter?
Because humans use time as an indicator for day and night
So we make things worse for humans in order to make it easier for computers? Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. This: "Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night." Shows that they are completely disconnect from human reality: "Science already doesn’t use local…
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The correct answer is obvious — to stabilize the Earth's rotation — but there are a few implementation details to work out.
If we simply detonate the moon it would cease affecting the Earth's rotation, thus solving the problem.
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If we simply detonate the moon it would cease affecting the Earth's rotation, thus solving the problem.
Wouldn't work afaict. You'd have to get rid of the mass, not just explode it.
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I've wanted to do this for years. Every time I mention this to someone I get a surprisingly visceral reaction against it even when they can't think of any real reasons why this would be bad.
I absolutely do not believe that nobody has given you a coherent list of reasons.
> Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night. A very interesting idea, but probably much too progressive.
I'm for this. Get rid of timezones, AM, PM, DST, leap years, seconds, all of it! Imagine having to know just one time. It takes a bit to wrap your head around. But only because we've accepted all the confusion for so long. The sun is still going to be "up" in one part of the world and "down" in another. The little numbers on your clock don't change that. Why can't it be the same little numbers everywhere?
So we make things worse for humans in order to make it easier for computers? Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. This: "Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night." Shows that they are completely disconnect from human reality: "Science already doesn’t use local…
I don't think it's that big of a deal; do you really care what the perception of "11 in the morning" is for someone 1,000 years ago? This kind of thing is pretty cultural anyway, and a slow drift over a thousands of years doesn't really matter.
The main reason we have the "new" Gregorian calendar is because of religious reasons, not because people were having huge practical problems with the old (slightly less accurate) Julian calendar.
Plus the current leap second system won't really deal with the long-term drift anyway because the earth's rotation keeps slowing, so in a few hundred years we'd need more leap seconds than the current system allows, and eventually we'd need a "leap second" every day because the day is a second longer (around the year 6000 IIRC).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we simply detonate the moon it would cease affecting the Earth's rotation, thus solving the problem.
Wouldn't work afaict. You'd have to get rid of the mass, not just explode it.
I'm sure kibwen had in mind a Hollywood explosion, whereby a detonated object ceases to exist, rather than turning into many smaller objects.