[layman51]

Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.

[lloeki]

It's also not impacting _only_ at that time, many tasks involve dates in the future, and a system dealing with a far enough off date _today_ is already impacted.

So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"

And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.

[LorenPechtel]

Or humans make a mistake. I got burned by the MsDos date rollover with signed values ~20 years ago. A salesman fat-fingered a job into the 2060s. Of course while I was on the other side of the world with no phone access.