I went to my local planetarium recently and learnt that the earth to moon distance increases by 38mm each year, while the earth rotation slows down very slightly. Obviously not a significant amount to mean anything right now, but what will happen in the future when it will make a difference? How will people just “add time” to hours/days/weeks/months and so forth?
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Engineer here: we deal with this today by adding leap seconds, usually after big earthquakes slow down the earth a bit. Every few years on midnight the 60th second happens twice. You’ve never noticed because we did our jobs right. It’ll be a long, long time before this strategy stops working and we need to officially do something more drastic like slow down the second.
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