My first interpretation of the title was that UTC was in danger of something that needed fixing. It didn't occur to me that "continuity" meant in the mathematical sense. But thanks for bringing this to our general attention! It's great news.

On a side note, I really like how the site formatted the reasoning. I'll be copying it to my technical writing.

Good, point, I've reworded that bit.

I'm well aware that HN doesn't have @ tags, but I would be surprised if dan doesn't have something listening for this specific string. And not a big enough deal to warrant an email in my opinion, but you're free to send one.

Having heard that neutrinos explained the scientific basis of zodiac signs on personality, I'd hope that they'd be more busy trying to set up their underground neutrino detectors /s.

A chronometer off by one second gives an approximate error of 0.25 nautical miles at the equator. Meanwhile the general precision of celestial navigation is 1-5 nautical miles. If you need high level accurate positioning, celestial navigation is already not an option.

In the open seas, celestial navigation is more than accurate enough. Once you are closer to shore, where the greater precision is needed, better options exists. Lights, ranges, radar, visual, etc.

> …the next which is expected in roughly a 1000 years: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/futuredelt.svg

Which doesn't seem like that is soon, but time/calendar issues can creep up and then it's a big hullabaloo:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

This essentially means being less anal about ensuring the earth has the exact same clock time at the exact same earth-sun-relative rotational position. Turns out the earth spins up and slows down semi-randomly with a magnitude big enough to require positive or negative leap seconds every few years, and it's just not worth the effort. Leap minutes might only be needed around every 100 years, but that would still be annoying, so they dropped all the way to leap hours, probably not needed for thousands of years. As long as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the afternoon, that saves on a lot of frequent minor adjustments. Timezones are already an hour wide anyways, and the sun isn't in the same spot when you're on the western vs eastern edges.

Sure, you could also run a relativistic simulation of the solar system, galaxy, and cosmos to establish a more monotonic clock and calendar independent of imperfect orbital parameters, but that's a bit much for discerning whether or not it's lunchtime.

Several hundred years at least (see my sibling comment). And in all likelihood this will be handled by shifting the time zones by an hour, or possibly by omitting one DST adjustment in spring.

In the very far future, leap seconds would become inadequate anyway, as you’d have to insert them every month, then every week, then every day, due to the deceleration of Earth’s rotation.

in 100 years the Sun will be inside the Dyson sphere, so there will be no need for further solar time adjustment

The actual rationale here is that it's not worth trying to figure out whether a hypothetical leap hour in a thousand years would be worth it, or how to pull it off if so, because no advance preparation for that scenario that we can do today has enough value to outweigh our ignorance of what the world will look like then. If they decide not to do it, they can just change the rules again; there'll be plenty of advance notice.