Poul-Henning Kamp says:
If we abandon leapseconds today to avoid getting computer problems, we still have several hundred years of time to decide how to deal with any long term effects.
Two other points to add to earlier replies: 1) If UTC is preserved similar to its current definition (but perhaps with changes to leap second scheduling and notification infrastructure, for instance), we can indeed later decide to cease issuing leap seconds at any point. It ain't so easy to put Humpty back together again, though. If our grandchildren were to decide to reintroduce mean solar time seventy five years from now, the only option would be to issue an awkward correction of - say - 113 seconds. Try explaining that one to the public. We can take as long as we want - now - before making a major change to civil timekeeping. Such a change should be regarded as irreversible. 2) How do we know that only astronomers will be affected? Am baffled at the resistance to the suggestion that a risk analysis be undertaken. A risk scenario: Concerns are raised about possible disruptions leap seconds may cause every few years to navigation by air and sea. Leap seconds are halted. Civil time as used by the aviators and mariners (call it NT for "Navigation Time") begins to diverge from UT. First risk - do all airlines and shipping lines automatically hew to NT for all purposes? Or will UT time signals persist for some some subsystems of some planes and ships from some countries under some circumstances? A lack of imagination of how this might occur is no protection - only an inventory similar to, but perhaps even more invasive than, Y2K will suffice. Second risk - a later change to fundamental assumptions made during the design of a complicated system often reveals contingent errors in components that depend on those assumptions. We have the issue of DUT1 exceeding 0.9s, of course, but other algorithmic assumptions may have been made. For instance, use of UTC for calculating intervals requires a table of leap seconds. We're given to understand that this is subject to error. Those errors are as likely to be revealed by the absence of leap seconds as by their continued presence. Simply introducing interval time doesn't guarantee that interval calculations are bug free. Third risk - UT or GMT permit the use of simple closed form algorithms for converting between local and standard, mean and apparent time (for example). This is precisely the area of remediation that will cause astronomers to incur significant costs - we would have to add DUT1 corrections to our many assorted systems. Navigation applications face similar remediation - even if only for backup systems in the case of a GPS outage. Will all airlines, all shipping companies, all air and seaports, all national and international air and sea traffic control systems, all communications channels carry out this remediation - and carry it out perfectly? Won't the DUT1 term be added in some instances where it should have been subtracted? Such an error might only be revealed years later when DUT1 passes some threshold. The phrase "ticking time bomb" comes to mind. Fourth risk - sabotage, or simply stale data structures. NT will often need to be corrected using DUT1. Values for DUT1 change and must be maintained in some tabular data structure. That table must be loaded with some cadence using some strategy - perhaps the values are downloaded when needed from the internet - perhaps they are preloaded into firmware. In either case, the values may be incorrect due to either intentional or unintentional mischief. The behavior of two otherwise similar systems may diverge simply because their data structures or strategies for updating these differ. Ignore all of the many other misadventures that could result from clock errors - do I really need to spell out the possibility of midair or sea collisions from any of these risks? A primary, well tested, system goes out for some obscure radio beacon, for instance. The secondary system has a bug whose genesis is risk 1, 2, 3 or 4. A plane from one airline uses that beacon - another airline's aircraft is flying a parallel track in the opposite direction (as I am assured they do to high precision) but is guided by a different navigation system without the same bug. Their intended paths never cross, their actual paths do. Or an oil tanker runs aground, or an owner piloted sailboat misses landfall in the middle of the Pacific, or... High precision systems - systematically inaccurate. Even the most well-conceived and carefully planned incremental change to civil timekeeping might require a deployment schedule allowing for very lengthy stages of remediation and testing. But in this case a dramatic change is proposed to the core philosophy of timekeeping - we would be moving from a phenomenologically coherent situation (mean solar time kept up to date via small corrections) - to an even interval time scale in which any conversion to Earth orientation would have to be introduced explicitly. Leap seconds are asserted to be a risk. Does their lack present fewer risks? Prove it. Rob Seaman NOAO
