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

ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 71 points –

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?

78

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.

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?

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.

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!!

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 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.

Show me the real excel fan boy

[comment before with A0000]

I said the real fan boy

[DaleGribble88]

Perfect

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.

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.

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.

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?

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"

we should really update this to "After when some people thought Jesus was born but they fucked up by 4-6 years. Also why is there no year zero?"

AWSPTJWBBTFUB4YAWITNYZ doesn't really roll off the tongue, though. Maybe it's better if someone can translate that into Latin.

Edit: Google Translate says "Post cum quidam putant natus est Jesus, sed eruditionis 4-6 annis. Cur etiam annus nullus est nullus?" so I propose "Post cum"

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.

Nah, we'll never get there. (When we do, major Y10K crisis. 💣💥)

We shkuld switch to a base12 number and metric system.

You're thinking too small. Base 60 (Sexagesimal)..the Sumerians had the right idea.

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.

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

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

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

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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~

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.