[Dibby053]

Timekeeping is timeless. We count the number of orbits around the Sun from a specific guy's birthday 2000 years ago, our 12 months are named after rulers of an empire that hasn't existed for almost as long, and weekdays are named after the pagan gods that guy replaced. I don't know why there are 7 days in a week, but supposedly there are 86400 seconds in a day because some Bronze Age people liked the numbers 60 and 12.

Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute, their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support for it in a C library that only understands (now, 128-bit) Unix timestamps.

[defrost]

Yeah, nah - that "we" doesn't cover all the other calendars also in use.

  The Julian period is a chronological interval of 7980 years, derived from three multi-year cycles: the indiction, solar, and lunar cycles. The last year that was simultaneously the beginning of all three cycles was 4713 BC (−4712), so that is year 1 of the current Julian period, making AD 2026 year 6739 of that Period.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

> Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute

You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?

[Dibby053]

By "we" I mean ~everybody, as the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication.

>You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?

Of course, GPS for one. My point is about the legacy of it all. Long time after those satellites are down, some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.

[defrost]

> the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication.

Save for those that care about missing days and months.

As long as cross country events prior to ~1756 aren't being discussed, things get messy and non uniform fast.

Also, there are Gregorian adjacent calendar variants with a Year 0

> some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.

A future where the spin of the earth still isn't a uniform metronome - a future with the same issue that exists today (and last century).

> their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support

Much of this support has _already_ been added - SKA data networks, for example, have to account for timing issue caused by receivers on one side of planet turning toward a source Vs those on the other side turning away - and reconcile that with past data from the other side of the orbit when the planet was moving toward Vs now when it moves away.