Aspasia Karras: Earth is in menopause, so time itself needs to take a break

Do you find yourself among that section of the population who believe there are never enough hours in the day? Oh ye harried masses, you overstretched ones running on fumes and endless reminders on your phone for things you are meant to be doing, meetings you are meant to be in, appointments and school pick ups — yes you! — I come bearing good news and tidings of great joy! Our days are getting longer. Not because of daylight saving, but because of our own efforts. Human agency and all that. Our actions are finally paying off. 

Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, shows that the day is indeed getting longer. Admittedly only by milliseconds, but in this dog-eat-dog world of overscheduling and high-anxiety living, every millisecond counts.

Unfortunately it is not necessarily good news for the people running things like satellites, spacecraft, GPS, internet-messaging systems or the world’s financial transactions and other super technically advanced stuff that powers the world as we know it. They happen to rely on the accuracy of clocks — in inverse proportion to me, who has a looser relationship to time. I believe in a little give on either side of the atomic clock. It is, however, an issue when the give manifests on a global scale. 

The give was always actually built in, which gives me great joy (what with the guilt of always being a smidgen late, you understand). The way the clock works is that the phases of the moon, the shifting poles and factors like the melting ice caps have been calculated and calibrated into the measurement of time and space for as long as there has been an atomic clock. Then they spit out a number and we all agree on it. Now there just happens to be more of it.

Why is the slowdown happening? Well, because the Earth is in menopause and retaining water around the middle. I am going with a positive spin on this. Some haters would say Earth is just getting fatter around the equator. Pish posh. What is basically happening is that the water off the polar ice caps is melting faster than it used to. Much faster. Because of our aforementioned human efforts. So where the rate of the slowing of time varied between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond per century (ms/cy) between 1900 and 2000, for the past 24 years, as the melting accelerated, so has the rate of change to 1.3ms/cy. Millisecond shmillisecond you cry! Come on, what does this mean in real terms?

I don’t know. Ask those guys on Wall Street trying to short our currency. Or Elon Musk, who has basically decided that the game’s up on planet Earth and has put his plans for the occupation of Mars into acceleration mode. Who wants to be stuck on a planet with an increasingly flabby waistline, when you could be heading to Mars with Elon as paterfamilias running the place on his sperm bank and Twitter, sorry, X.

Imagine the joy of that political establishment, where those who shout loudest and kowtow to the great leader most obsequiously on his social network will get the most airtime from inside their space suits and pods. Unfortunately, the air on Mars is still inhospitable to human life. But Elon has a plan for that too: genetic mutations to accommodate the Martian atmospheric conditions. Don’t worry, it’s still a great plan. If you build it, they will come.

In the meantime, Donald Trump will have ensured that we don’t need to worry in advance about the floods, cyclones, hurricanes and unusual weather events on this old planet anyway. Part of the plan for his new path to global domination is to defund the US weather service. Why pay meteorologists to give us minute-by-minute updates when we can live in a kind of mindless fog of disinformation?

Private weather services are a much better idea — funded by shady organisations, powered by the fossil fuels and industrial farming fattening up our planet. After all, they need to put a better spin on the crap weather they are helping to make. Also those flooded or burnt out of house and home can just rely on their primary sources of information, namely their eyes and ears for weather patterns when they actually hit them — just like we used to do when the world was a little skinnier.

It’s really great to see how much of an effect we humans are having on the planet. Geological changes that previously took billions of years or relied on direct hits from giant asteroids are now totally within our grasp. In just a few decades, we have managed to shift the poles by 4m, and lengthen our days purely by our own willpower. It’s amazing stuff. Onwards and upwards, I say. Take every millisecond and make it count, otherwise you can book a berth to Mars; the Elon rocket will be leaving more or less on time. 

This column was originally published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.