The dilemma of adjusting time.

Last June 29 was the shortest day since atomic clocks began to measure time, it was 1.59 milliseconds shorter, almost a month later on July 26 it was about to break that record again being 1.5 milliseconds shorter what looks like nothing.

Every time the accumulated gap between solar time or UT1 and international atomic time or TAI approaches a second, the international service of earth rotation and reference systems or IERS for its acronym in English proposes to add a leap second to reflect it in UTC or universal coordinated time, which is what all our electronics, servers, banks, practically all our technology use, except gps gps satellites have atomic clocks and work with international atomic time so they are not affected for leap seconds, but pretty much everything else is.

The graph shows the lag in seconds, from the beginning of the measurement in 1972 the line goes down gradually and then suddenly goes up when an adjustment is made by adding one second to the universal coordinated time, you can see how from 1999 the The lag was less pronounced and it was many years before a leap second was needed to be added in 2006.

Since then the lag has stayed slower but in the last two years it seems to stop completely and then and up which means in the future we probably need to take a second off rather than add it to avoid lagging in the opposite direction with a land which seems to be accelerating.

In this other graph you can see how the duration of the solar day has been reducing in the last four years thanks to the acceleration of the rotation of the earth, July 19, 2020 was the shortest solar day since the beginning of its measurements in 1972 and on June 29 of this year 2022 that record was broken again.

Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and others have protested the adjustments that are made when leap seconds are added, every time a leap second occurs they have problems, if it were up to them we would no longer adjust the time we would let the utc and solar time they will move slowly until the noon sun shines at midnight, ok to get to that it would take many, many years.

We are a civilization that has full confidence that at some point in the not too distant future we will conquer the other planets of the solar system and other things, giving up with the simple task of keeping time adjusted seems too lazy or tedious, it's not like it's a very difficult and unsolvable problem.

These companies that complain about the leap second have literally all the resources to solve it, the problem is that they are not willing to lift a single finger when it is not something that will directly and immediately benefit them, long-term problems are not their problem According to them, in fact, that is our main synthesized existential problem, not planning beyond the immediate future.

Imagine, the time of our civilization can be unraveling little by little only because Facebook, Google, Amazon and others do not want to solve their synchronization problems, giant companies deciding how we measure time, the truth is that measuring time is hard, time is a complete disaster and besides it is imaginary.

To measure time we rely on the movement of an erratic ball of rock, water and other things that wobbles while spinning in the middle of a vacuum at the mercy of external forces such as the moon, the sun, the other planets and many things that we do not know, that is not exact, nor regular, but even so we need time because we cannot function without it, we are very rare animals that see the time all the time, obsessed with the passage of time, only the white rabbit does it and he was very crazy .

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