It seems like it’d get increasingly impractical as the years go on to hundreds of thousands and millions of years to write them out that way, but then…I guess technically one may already do this with the preceding years, so future’s fair game for it?
People already abbreviate to the last two digits when appropriate, so it’s not hard to imagine people doing the same for bigger numbers.
For keeping track of stuff electronically, we’re pretty much set too. 64 bit unix time will take us well over 100 billion years.
I was looking at some old pictures of my family and some of them had dates like 921 for 1921 in them. I used to abbreviate 88 for 1988, but I’ve never seen people using 3 digits like that.
I don’t think anyone cares at this point, that’s a problem for 300ish generations from now.
Can’t wait for the drama to patch Windows XP to survive y10k.
it’s going to be hard to get to 40k if we don’t keep counting through the 10s.
In lore, in warhammer humans count XXX.MYY.
Like 005.M31 to 014.M31 for the Horus Heresy in the 31st millennium.
I vote we switch up to that system. The counting, not the
heresy.coward.
Maybe average life expectancy will be 800 years then and 10000 won’t be that big a number anyways.
Astronomers already use Julian Dates for various reasons. Right now it’s 2460261.2834606, it’ll be later by the time you read this. Julian dates/times are fractional days starting from January 1st, 4713 = 0. Just keep counting up from there.
I’m sure we’ll switch to star dates by then.
According to Zager and Evans, the year 9595 will pretty much be it.
They’ll just go to A001, thus pushing back the problem for 26,000 more years.
Thus
pushing back the problem for 26,000 more years.solving the problem once and for all!!
I don’t see why not. 5 digits isn’t too bad, and the issue wouldn’t come up again for another 90,000 years after that. Besides, we’ll probably extinct ourselves through climate change, nuclear war, and/or AI long before then anyways.
We’ll probably have a Calendar system switch to a new major event
BC - Before Christ
AD - After Christ (but in Latin)
ADR - After Christ Returns (but in Martian)
AD - After Christ (but in Latin)
eh… not quite
it actually stands for “Anno Domini”, which is latin, but means “in the year of the lord”
I would hope that time and date formats would be redesigned by that point. If we would live to y10k, I’d expect a lot of space colonization. At that point, I’d expect there to be some other point of reference to define timestamps.
Agreed. Let’s get the conversation started on this. Personally, I’d like to use midnight of January 1st, 1970. That seems like a nice rational spot. The new time scale will just count the number of seconds since then. So, for example, this comment could be written at approximately 1699879376.
I love it! That would be EPOCH!
Or we are in the year 12023
Why would that be a problem? We already often only use the last two digits to refer to the year, that’ll probably not change.
There are a lot of things it depends on.
First is whether we are still using the same calendar base date. The currently accepted international system is based on Christendom, but there are other calendars out there with different dates. You could see a switch over if another group becomes more dominant. Or you could get another system implemented entirely; France tried to change its base year to the French Revolution.
Second is if Earth is the only human inhabited planet. We are already seeing that the Martian day throws a lot of coordination up in the air, and that is without having human bases there. It is possible that Mars develops its own calendar that better fits Martian time. At that point, the only link for calendars across humanity would be the Unix Epoch.
