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?

    • SnoopBob@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Julian@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

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

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Sabata11792@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • kambusha@feddit.ch
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Thavron@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Thus pushing back the problem for 26,000 more years. solving the problem once and for all!!

  • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • wolfshadowheart@kbin.social
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      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.

  • olsonexi@lemmy.wtf
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    1 year ago

    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.