The simplest solution is to uplift a polite portion of the Earth's mass into an orbital habitation ring, and use a feedback controller to regulate the amounts being launched, to keep the rotational period stabilized (in accordance with conservation of angular momentum) at an integer ratio to the sidereal year.<p>And for the other challenge, to stabilize the variation of the the sidereal year (i.e. the gravities of Jupiter &c. pulling the orbit slightly faster or slower), we simply schedule the launches at either the fore- (morning) or aft- (evening) ends.<p>To anyone sympathetic to my ideology, please consider using "fore", "aft", "port", and "starboard" to refer to the morning, evening, day, and night quadrants of the clock.
I agree, moving the earth's axis with respect to the sun seems actually feasible compared to getting a standards body to agree on coordinated change.
The title refers to a 1729 Jonathan Swift essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick"[1].<p>As with the subject article, Swift's work begins reasonably enough, and contains much great discussion before veering off wildly at the end.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal</a>
<p><pre><code> The ratio is around 365.2422. Calling it 365 is too crude. Julius Caesar said we should call it 365 1/4, and that was good enough for a while.
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This is blowing my mind that thousands of years ago they were able to measure the orbits to this level of accuracy.
Wish I'd known about Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' first - I came expecting practical Unix time insights, but found an attempt at satire in need of both editing and purpose.
Leap seconds are about keeping 12pm synchronized with solar noon, not the length of the year?<p>This makes no sense:<p>> … or not add leap seconds and allow the year to drift with respect to the day.
if we mobilized a whole-of-society effort to build millions of rocket engines and fired them year round, it'd only take a few hundred years to get this done
If you have problem with Unix time you are probably using it wrong. It is monotonically rising timer that increments every second. That's it. It doesn't care about leap second, leap years or any of the orbits.
Unix time should never have been a number of seconds.<p>It should be a structured of the iso datetime fields, like in "struct tm", see <a href="https://cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/tm/" rel="nofollow">https://cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/tm/</a>