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Oh no, it's much worse than that. On Earth you can generally treat time as being the same speed everywhere. If you start a timer at T1 UTC and run it for a locally observed 60 seconds you can expect the current UTC time to be T1+60 seconds. In space relativistic effects stop being negligible and you might find that UTC time is T1+61 seconds.

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We have clocks that are wrong all the time already, I'm not sure how that makes date time libraries worse. GPS satellites are in space, they have to deal with relativity effects, and mostly everything seems fine.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279076/why-does-the-lea...

One second can be a big deal.

Or you can change the relative speed with which it tracks its time. Smearing is already used for additional seconds, it should be possible to be used here, too.

But GPS satellites have constant velocity so calculating this is pretty easy. For a future super probe that accelerates and decelerates and maybe passes through many different gravitational fields (giving a general relativity time dilation) and perhaps does so for many centuries, the possibility of error mounts up.

I'd vote for time being defined in terms of some universally observable phenomenon. Say the rate of cooling of the CMB. Anyone with a super spiffy radio telescope anywhere in the universe could then tell what time it is.

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