🌍 What if we switched to 25-hour days?

A young start-up claims to be working on a way to lengthen the duration of Earth's days.

Presented as a major innovation, the project — named the Gadus Terra program — would aim to slightly slow down the Earth's rotation. The stated goal: to gradually move from 24 to 25 hours per day, in order to better adapt to modern constraints and habits.

According to the company, the solution would rely on a constellation of satellites placed in low Earth orbit. These would exert a minimal but continuous force, capable, in the long term, of influencing the Earth's rotation without causing major disruptions.


The founders, including physicist Prof. Thunnus Albacares and orbital dynamics engineer Dr. Salmo Salar, state that the approach is based on established physical principles. They notably mention effects comparable to those of the Moon on tides, but amplified in a controlled manner.

The slowdown would be gradual, spread over several years, and would remain imperceptible on a daily scale. To strengthen the system's stability, the team — recently joined by complex systems specialist Dr. Scomber Scombrus — proposes continuously adjusting the rotation based on global parameters.

According to the project's leaders, this lengthening of days would address, among other things, a well-identified phenomenon: the increasing time spent on social networks. They estimate that a significant portion of our days now "escapes" essential activities, fragmented into micro-moments of attention. By adding a daily hour, the goal would therefore be to "compensate for this scattered time" and rebalance habits, without asking users to change their routines.

A justification which, according to some observers, essentially amounts to adapting time... to our screens. Furthermore, the Gadus Terra program would include a feature still in the testing phase: the "bonus day" mode. This would offer, on an occasional basis, a 26-hour day, funded through a partnership with several streaming platforms.

But the start-up doesn't stop there. It is already considering an enhanced version of the system with an "Enterprise" plan. In this plan under study, weekdays could be slightly longer, then shortened on weekends, to "optimize population productivity."

Faced with these announcements, the scientific community remains divided. While the initial foundations of the project rely on established concepts, its most recent developments seem to be more of an... April Fools' joke!