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0 pointsBeltalowda3y ago0 comments

> Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up.

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).

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Eleison233y ago

Religion was only half the reason for the Gregorian calendar reform. Church and state, being interlinked and intertwined, the civil calendar was gradually slipping away from correct calibration with the equinoxes and thus the seasons. So it was important for farmers and mariners and politicians to all have a reliable calendar that matched what the Earth was actually going through.

It just so happened that the religious authority in the West was able to make a significant change to the civil calendar which also happened to match the Church calendar, and it was adopted by all of Christendom, eventually even Asia and the four corners of the Earth have accepted it as universal and not so religious.

BeltalowdaOP3y ago

That was I was told in history lesson, too, but I'm not so sure that was all that important of a reason, otherwise it wouldn't have taken hundreds of years for people to adopt the new calendar. The drift is so slow that a week more or less over a period of 1,000 years is easily something that can slowly be adjusted to by farmers, politicians, and the like (unlike, say, the Roman calendar before Caesar reformed it which drifted by several days every year).

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