[ddeville]

From their about page:

> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

[taneq]

Still only pushes the problem back for an additional 100k years. If they were really serious they’d use prefix codes. :P

[Arcorann]

RFC 2550 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550) remains one of my favourite April Fools' RFCs. It even has support for negative dates.

[iso1210]

That seems like a needlessly complex way to store datetime

Dark era starts in 10^106 years time, or about 10^157 plank times, so any time can be respresented in 20 bytes.

Just 44 bytes will allow encoding of any point in spacetime, and they are using far more than that to simply encode years.

[hexane360]

The RFC admits that and then says:

>2.4.2 Transcending Environmental Considerations

>However, we might get lucky. So, Y10K dates are able to represent any possible time without any limits to their range either in the past or future.

[posnet]

I am more worried about what we will do when we run out of 64 bit seconds for unix time.

500 billion years is barely half way through the star forming age of the universe.

[Dylan16807]

Well, timespec does have 34 bits it's not using...

[thanatropism]

But who currently says that Rome fell in the year 0476?

[ken]

The Romans didn't have computers, so they didn't worry bout using only 3-digit years back then. And today, looking back, using fewer digits than available doesn't cause any problem. There's only an issue going forward, when more digits are needed, which the Long Now is trying to mitigate (8000 years early).

[philipswood]

Precient Romans: didn't use a digit based system. MIM -> MM What problem?

[alvarelle]

Romans needed many more than 3 "digit" (or rather letter) to represent this date. Also, the AD system (counting the year since the birth of Jesus Christ) was introduced much later.

[ptr]

But aren't they running the risk of computers treating these as octal numbers instead?

[listenallyall]

Huh? They haven't solved it, anymore than reading a thermometer "is to solve" climate change. No need to repeat propaganda.