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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

If we assume that in 8000 our religious landscape and scientific knowledge will be substantially different (hint: it will), we’re going to need a few more digits.

Already today we can use the Holocene calendar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar but in 8k years we might have an accurate and useful measure to specific points that are easier to work with / more valuable.

Perhaps the unix epoch might even be the most significant start time.

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Dream, it'll be the birth year of some random new figure, a large event like the arrival of the aliens or the nuclear bombing of Taipei, anything else than the "UNIX" epoch. 8000 years you imagine, it's 4 times my language's age, ffs. I barely know what Unix is, and I don't expect to ever tell my children there was something before Linux lol.

I feel like humanity has gotten over novelty calendars. They were popular in the past, but now that we’re all connected over the internet people prefer compatibility. The only thing wrong with Unix time is that by default it ticks backwards when a leap second occurs. Smearing makes that bearable.

Maybe things will change when the max distance between humans is >>0 light years.

Leap seconds are bizarre, it matters little that the sun is so precicesly on Grenwhich meridian at 12:00, anything that cares about that second can add or subtract potentially milliseconds why is one se ond significant and one millisecond not. Shifting days off summer is one thing but shifting seconds off noon has no practical benefit and a huge cost.

I completely agree, and so do most people and countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#International_prop...

Too bad there are some nutjobs making the false claim that eliminating leap seconds will affect astronomy and appealing to tradition.

The new epoch will probably have time 0 as being the instant when we accidentally blow up the earth, adjusted for wherever we are in space by however long it takes the light from earth to get there. Assuming we have some lucky ones who do manage to escape the earth before then.

https://qntm.org/destroy

Obligatory reference to 'A Fire Upon the Deep' [0] by Vernor Vinge, in which programmers-at-arms on board starships do indeed trace their ship clocks back to ancient computer systems and Unix in particular

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

It's actually the prequel, 'A Deepness in the Sky', that has this. Both very good books.

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