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Is it really 2010?
Well if it is 2010, and we have been using a 24-Hour clock. Over time, are we losing accuracy in the date? A day is actually 23 hours & 56 minutes. 1440 minutes in a day, BUT, after a year we are off by 1 day and 20 minutes, and every leap year wouldn't make it up. So aren't we off by maybe a few years?
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I just saw this article on MentalFloss, and it reminded me of your question.
Apparently, we add a leap second every once in a while to make our time sync up better with astronomical time.
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Not like it matters, time is a man-made concept anyway. Our Gregorian calendar has a leap year every 4 years, unless the year is divisible by 100, in which we suspend the leap year rule. That is, unless the year is divisible by 400, in which case we suspend the suspension. That is, unless the year is divisible by 4000, in which case we suspend the suspension of the suspension of the rule.
Math is hard! We're clearly all gonna die in 2012 anyway.
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well the world is millions of year old, but time was started counting 2,010 years ago.
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It depends a good bit on when you start to count.
You can get even more basic than doing the math to the second, and ask yourself, if Jesus was actually born 2010 years ago? There are many people who think the early Christians got the year wrong.
In the earliest days of mechanical time telling, each town would set their own time by watching the sun for high noon. As a traveler journeyed from town to town they would find the town's timekeeper (frequently the mayor, but also sometimes a priest or innkeeper) and adjust their clocks if they had them.
So you see, at that point, no one went by an arbitrary number of seconds in the day. They were constantly adjusting their time telling devices to synchronize with the sun. That approach was called Solar Time and was praticed even before we invented clocks. The first clocks were constantly being adjusted and wound up to match the Solar Time of where ever the person was that day.
Since then, there have been several ways to 'tell time'. First there was standard time, in the mid nineties most countries started to observe the time zones. Then Greenwich Mean Time, which was officially renamed Universal Time in 1929.
We still use Universal Time today.
The most accurate clocks we have today, are the atomic clocks. They are acurrate to 1 billionth of a second.
Because the earth's rotation speed actually varies a bit over the year, we've even had to correct the time we use from the atomic clock (by adding leap seconds and milliseconds!).
The time that the atomic clocks tell is about 34 seconds faster than Universal Time.
So you see, we have always had good systems for measuring time, and when it comes to time, the most important thing isn't the we get it RIGHT (unless you are talking about experimental physics) it's that we all get along and understand each other. That ability to communicate time's passing, across countries and around the world, has always been the key goal of time telling, and we've learned to do that very, very well.
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