[Baron Munchausen]

Hmm, there are only 31,536,000 seconds in a year. At a loss rate of one second per year we'd be falling into the sun in very short order on a geologic time scale. Obviously this cannot have been going on for long if the earth has been here for billions of years. There must be something funky going on that we don't understand. Maybe the sun's magnetic field is strong enough to slow us down at times? Or some sort of time-space warping is going on to make it look like the earth's orbital period is changing when it is not. It would be funny if they discovered there was some calibration error in their instruments....