Long ago we humans defined a day as the time it takes Earth to make one rotation about its axis, with one sunrise and one sunset. Our predecessors partitioned that day into 24 hours. But if Earth's rotation slows down a little, it takes a bit longer than one day to complete it. That has been happening for many years.
For the first time, however, we may have to subtract a leap second because since around 1990 Earth's rotation has been speeding up, counteracting the slowdown and shortening the day.
Each time an adjustment is needed, a mind-boggling number of computers and telecom operations have to be changed. On a regular day, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which keeps atomic time for the U.S. and synchronizes most of the world's computers, receives more than 100 billion time-coordination requests from up to a billion computers.
What if we just ignored the fact that Earth's rotation and atomic clocks are off by a second or even off by one minute, which they are estimated to be a century from now if we do nothing until then?
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