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.
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
Grr. Is THAT why I had to subtract 1900 off my year for a damn c library time function?
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.
A new robot Messiah will arrive in 8630 so our year 10000 aC will be their 1370 aR
FYI, the abbreviation is AD for “anno domini”. Anno Christi would work too but it’s not the normal choice.
Kudos for AR, would that be “Anno Roboticus”?
I thought After Christ lol
You’re Italian too, huh?
Yep! You wouldn’t have usually noticed but… brain fart!
Happens to the best of us lol
A000 is next
Found the Excel fanboy
? It’s hexadecimal
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.
I love it! That would be EPOCH!
Show me the real excel fan boy
[comment before with A0000]
I said the real fan boy
[DaleGribble88]
Perfect
That’s Unix epoch, dude. It predates excel
No I think time will just stop.
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
Y10k bug will end society
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!
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.
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 10^44 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 12^41 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It’s about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (12^43) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (12^45) 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?
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.
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.
I don’t know if you read the right wiki, but in the history section the first paragraph is:
The Julian day number is based on the Julian Period proposed by Joseph Scaliger, a classical scholar, in 1583 (one year after the Gregorian calendar reform) as it is the product of three calendar cycles used with the Julian calendar:
28 (solar cycle) × 19 (lunar cycle) × 15 (indiction cycle) = 7980 years
Its epoch occurs when all three cycles (if they are continued backward far enough) were in their first year together. Years of the Julian Period are counted from this year, 4713 BC, as year 1, which was chosen to be before any historical record.[28]
It was either that, or earlier, or in the future. That’s the only year that kinda makes sense (solar = lunar = induction = 0). It looks odd but once you know you know, you know?
DOH, skipped those two critical letters! Thanks for the correction.
