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If civilization continues to the year 9999, is the idea to go to year 10.000, or...?

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?

julianh ,

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.

argh_another_username ,

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.

AA5B ,

During y2k, a third digit was one of the compromises for languages like Perl. There were so many places that only displayed a two digit year but rolling over to 00 would have made it difficult to sort or do date math, or even to convert to a four digit year. So the year rolled over from 99 to 100, so dates with two digit years could be sorted correctly. If you were only displaying two digits, it probably correctly displayed as 00. If you wanted to convert to four digit years,just add 1900

hddsx ,

Grr. Is THAT why I had to subtract 1900 off my year for a damn c library time function?

cobwoms ,

we’re going to have a y2k bug situation all over again. the y10k bug

folkrav ,

Ackchyually, the Y2K bug was pretty different. A lot of software, for various reasons, took to representing dates as a two digit number. This meant going from 1999 to 2000 would make that software try to understand dates going from 99 to potentially various of other values, like 00 or 100.

We’re gonna have a different form of that on machines with 32 bit processors relatively soon. Past some time on Jan 19th, 2038, the epoch time, a count of seconds since Jan 1st, 1970, is stored as a 32 bit signed integer. At this time, it’ll run out of positive values, will overflow, and cause the internal clocks of such machines to go back to 1901. It probably won’t happen again after that, as the maximum date represented by the largest signed integer a 64 bit machine can store is 292+ billion years

hydrashok ,

Good luck to all the engineers billions of years from now having fun moving to 128-bit time. What fools we were.

folkrav ,

Silver lining is, they should be done with the IPv6 migration by then.

Cosmicomical ,

Shouldn't it go back to 1970? Why 1901?

Skua ,

It's a signed integer, meaning it has the same amount of space for negative numbers as it does for positive ones. Late 1901 is the same amount of time away from Jan 1st 1970 as early 2038 is

blargerer ,

The integer is signed, when it overflows it doesn't go to 0, it goes from Max Positive Value to Max Minimum Value, which will be a very 'large' negative number (-2147483648 to be exact).

AA5B ,

I’m pretty sure all operating systems have long ago switched to 64 bit date times. Of course, just like y2k, it’s the apps and their shortcuts that will be a problem.

folkrav ,

There has to be millions of IoT/embedded crap that runs some long obsolete OS version or whatever. Consumer stuff indeed shifted a looong time ago.

BlameThePeacock ,

I don’t think anyone cares at this point, that’s a problem for 300ish generations from now.

Jay ,

I don’t think that’s a question any human will have to answer. Humanity will be long gone by then.

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