For half a century, humanity has quietly negotiated a truce between its most precise instruments and the imperfect spin of the Earth, inserting occasional leap seconds to keep atomic clocks tethered to the solar day. Now, as the planet accelerates its rotation and digital systems grow ever more fragile to sudden temporal disruptions, international timekeepers are weighing whether to sever that ancient bond entirely. The proposal to eliminate leap seconds — and replace them, eventually, with leap hours measured in centuries — would mark the moment humanity's official clock fully departed from t