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Scientists just voted to redefine how the world keeps time
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Yes, you're reading this right. In a 50-100 years the difference between UTC and UT1 will grow to one minute. In about 6000 years it can be even one hour and we will have to change our schedules.
They never give us enough time, you know?
At least we'll get an extra hour here in several thousand years.
I feel like the "problem" here is that we won't remember to do this in 6000 years, and the habit of doing it each leap second keeps us maintaining time, whereas the leap hour will just fall into forgotten history.
So essentially I feel like with this announcement, scientist are basically saying "balls to this, we're done here".
Maybe we should build a scary-looking shrine with pictograms to remind our descendants of the issue and warn them to keep track
Our descendants: Makes a religion around it or studies it as an unexplainable artifact
The year 8k problem.
Remember to future-proof your code against the year 8027 problem.
So in 144000 years we either skip a leap year or don’t skip one we usually would, whichever it is
It says “more than 1,000 years”, how’d you get 6,000?
1 minute every ~100 years, 60 minutes in an hour. Why 1000? 🤷