Mark Calabretta says: > I agree with you that there is plenty of time to make an informed > decision, that nothing need be done on a timescale of decades, and > also that the process to date appears, at least to some of us, to > have bordered on Machiavellian, though I'm sure it was not.
I'm glad the subtleties in my arguments haven't been lost :-) > However, your "consistent slope of about 7 seconds per decade" > obscures the basic point about the long term future of UTC. Your > graph shows a linear approximation to what is actually a parabola. Indeed. The biggest problem I've seen with this discussion since the beginning is a too eager willingness to move into a sky-is-falling debate about extremely long term effects. Perhaps I over simplified as a result. That UT1 and TAI are diverging quadratically can be used to strengthen the argument for civil time to track the former - after all, day will turn into night all the quicker. The question under discussion has never been how to *improve* UTC and civil time. In fact, it appears that a committee met exactly once and voted to reject all possible options except for discarding the standard entirely. Now, either that committee has also been discussing this issue privately on some other forum that is closed to us - or they haven't been discussing it at all. I'm not sure at which of these options I'd be more offended. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory
