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That’s not the point. How do you store a moment before 1970 if your timestamp is an unsigned integer?

This might seem like a silly question but could you give me an example use-case?

I'm struggling to think of a context where we basically want to create timestamps for things that happened in the past. Especially things that we want to dynamically localize rather than e.g. just store as a straight up timestamped string.

If you are creating a relationship between times in the past, you have to convert from string to something else. And the something else is always subject to some other detail - the calendar of the past is not defined identically throughout history, so you can't just extrapolate year-month-day backwards to get a time.

Nobody's really solved this, it has to be tackled anew for each case of "comparing dates from long ago".

With a p-adic number.

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