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?
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.
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.
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
Seeing as the current year is 12,023 I'm gonna say: Yes.
Can't wait for the drama to patch Windows XP to survive y10k.
I put in a lot of extra hours helping prevent y2k from being a disaster but I hope they’re not expecting me again for y10k
The chosen one. You will be frozen and revived thousands of years later to make sure we don't have to spend money to replace the label printer.
Hello AA5B, what's happening? Ummm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead come in on Saturday. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mmmkay...
Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.
A000 is next
Found the Excel fanboy
? It's hexadecimal
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.
The Unix Epoch is obviously the correct base for any calendar.
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!!
No I think time will just stop.
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.
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.
There’s already a movement to call it the 10000s because that’s about how long ago we had the idea to have permanent settlements
It's how long archeology has said we have had permanent settlements.
In reality it's likely far earlier than that, we only just found a settlement from 11,000 BCE in Turkey, Gobekli Tepe which was likely a sanctuary/shrine, as well as other towns in the surrounding area likely having started before even then.
Big archeology pushed back to say that that's not 100% certain and that humans were still nomadic, despite all the evidence showing otherwise. It was finally just recognized officially a couple months ago.
What’s going to happen, is that I’m going to start a Humanist cult, and they’re going to name the new age after me.
They’ll call it “the year of our salvation.” They just misremember everything, and think I was some hero. The reality is I’m an asshole and should never be trusted leading a quasi-religious crusade.
Yup, ducks are general assholes. And they rape a lot, which also tracks with the cult leaders. And they quack, too!
Y10k bug will end society
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.
Beyond maybe needing some sort of space calendar if we ever actually get off this rock in a way that matters, why not? An extra digit isnt all that big of a hassle.
If we're no longer on earth, days and years will be based on whatever orbit we're following. So I guess the counter would start from zero.
By then, I don't think that the use of earth's orbital period around the sun would make sense as a unit of measurement. It is important to track the seasons if you're living in an agricultural society. But the orbital period of the earth is not consistent across time, nor the time it takes for the earth to rotate. It doesn't make a good unit of measurement. And don't get me started on leap years, leap seconds, negative leap seconds, timezones and daylight saving times...
I'd prefer to base the new unit of time based on "Plank time". About 1044 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 1241 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It's about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (1243) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (1245) is about 1.8 hours. 12 of these (12^46) could be the equivalent of a day, 12 of that could be an equivalent of a week, and you can find an equivalent for a year. The duodecimal is unnecessary, but it makes division a bit neater. Now peak a date well before the beginning of human history to avoid the need for negative years (BC / AD) and that's it.
That way you get a single number that you can manipulate arithmetically. Not like yyyy/mm/dd format where each part is a different length.
...what?
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 B.C. = 0. Just keep counting up from there.
So I got confused and had to read Wikipedia for this. Day 0 is Jan 1, 4713 BC. I feel this causes more confusion if it isn’t mentioned.
How are you still not confused??
So I just read through the same wiki and there is absolutely no explanation of why they start at 4713 BC. It's just bizarrely stated as fact with no explanation.
It would be like if invented a card game called Percluey where you had to count to 44 and Yell "Percluey" to win the game. And 8s are also called perclueys and worth -3. Then when you ask why it's 44 you just say "because that's Percluey" and then when they ask you what the heck is a "Percluey" you just shrug and sip on your spritzer.
DOH, skipped those two critical letters! Thanks for the correction.
Well, no reason not to add a digit after 9999.
But yeah, at some point we ought to stop using years. It's the second that is standardized, and the year is all off. I can't imagine we reaching 9999, but the change has no relation to the extra digit and no reason to happen anywhere near it.
According to Zager and Evans, the year 9595 will pretty much be it.
Never thought I'd see that song as being optimistic
Eventually we reach 999.M41
And stay there for decades until we need an excuse to sell bigger models
obviously start counting backwards to zero
Nah, we'll never get there. (When we do, major Y10K crisis. 💣💥)
I'm sure we'll switch to star dates by then.
I don't think anyone cares at this point, that's a problem for 300ish generations from now.
I don't think that's a question any human will have to answer. Humanity will be long gone by then.
We shkuld switch to a base12 number and metric system.
You're thinking too small. Base 60 (Sexagesimal)..the Sumerians had the right idea.
Maybe average life expectancy will be 800 years then and 10000 won't be that big a number anyways.
we're going to have a y2k bug situation all over again. the y10k bug
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
At that point we switch to a Year (three digit) and Millennium (M followed by two digits) system, so the year 10,001 would be noted as 001.M10. After 999 M10 we reach 000.M11, and so on. Most applications would only really need the year number. /s
Happy new year 2314737893516!
It would make more sense to switch to a calendar with a different year 0. Like when human civilization started, which would make.the current year to 12k+. Or when earth started, which revolutions around the sun we are counting. Which would make the current year something with 4.5 billion.