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?

  • Narrrz
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    4210 months ago

    it’s going to be hard to get to 40k if we don’t keep counting through the 10s.

    • @[email protected]
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      2310 months 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
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    3510 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1010 months 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        610 months 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

  • Seraph
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    2510 months ago

    Seeing as the current year is 12,023 I’m gonna say: Yes.

  • Sabata11792
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    2210 months ago

    Can’t wait for the drama to patch Windows XP to survive y10k.

    • @[email protected]
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      1210 months 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
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        1210 months 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        310 months 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.

  • AmidFuror
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    1610 months ago

    They’ll just go to A001, thus pushing back the problem for 26,000 more years.

  • HobbitFoot
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    1610 months 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.

    • miak
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      810 months ago

      The Unix Epoch is obviously the correct base for any calendar.

  • VodkaSolution
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    1510 months ago

    A new robot Messiah will arrive in 8630 so our year 10000 aC will be their 1370 aR

  • @[email protected]
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    1210 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1210 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1210 months 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1210 months 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
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      910 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months 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.