Imagine thinking that’ll be the biggest date-related computing problem for a galactic society.
If you really want to make programmers despair, point out:
- massive variations in day, month and year lengths on different worlds.
- some worlds may not have “months” (no moons, or many moons).
- ambiguous definition of “year” for multi-star systems.
- days may be longer than years (hello Venus).
- communication latency across interstellar distances.
- tine dilation.
Don't we technically already have to account for time dilation for things like GPS satellites
That's easy. We'd just use Greg time.
Greg's age and mood is highly deterministic, and he has atoms in his body present from the big bang. His sense of time varies, and seems to accelerate as he gets older, and he will tell you about it with extreme detail down to either 2 decimal places or 3 beers. If you call him up and ask him what time it is, the degree of the obscenities used in his reply is usually a good enough correction coefficient when calling over long distances.
Also two of his kids hate him, and his current wife is thinking of leaving him; all countable metrics that one can use to ascertain what stage in his life Greg is at, and thus what the local date/time in your area is, based on all the above Greg stats.
Relief point: we will still be using unix timestamp.
Anxious point: we will still be using unix timestamp.
We're all just going to use tz_database and turn the maintainer into a ghost trapped in the machine for all of eternity.
tine dilation
Holds up fork and squints at it
It's what happens when James uses the good dining forks to unjam the cupboard door again.
I will just rely on ISO 8602 to introduce a universal time format
Then your only challenge will be converting to and from human-friendly formats and cleansing user input. Easy.
days may be longer than years (hello Venus).
Well, that was certainly the peak of human artistic achievement.
Also, interplanetary timezones and leaps.
Nah, all this is solved with star-dates. One of the Federation's crowning achievements - Warp Drive is small potatoes compared to getting hundreds of delegates from as many different worlds to all agree on one calendar system that is not based on their own world's orbit around its primary.. Diplomatic impossibility, but they managed it.
Don't worry, we're not far away from 2038, when 32 bit unix time rolls over 😅
<Padme mode> Hopefully we are all working on 64 bit dates, right? right? </Padme mode> :^)
Storing the date as offset in seconds from 1970 in 64bit should last to about the end of the universe, after that it's not my problem.
Programmers in the next universe iteration: deep sigh
There is always the assumption that we will colonize the galaxy in 7000 years. When really we will still be on earth and someone is still running and old FreeBSD machine in prod and just doesn't want to update cause it still works.
While I doubt will be stuck on Earth in 7000 years, there's absolutely going to be some of those old systems with 7000+ years of uptime. Just throw the nanite repair gel on it every 50 or so years.
Also hasn't been rebooted in 7000 years, because uptime is important
deleted by author cuz @scaverat beat me to it. : ^ )
It is only ~21th on the list of future problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs
03:14:07 UTC, 19 January 2038.
We simply reset the years when the Butlerian Jihad happens.
Also computer issues aren’t a problem anymore after that (perhaps aside from the Ixians).
My company still uses 2 digit year date. They're gonna have to deal with the whole y2k thing all over again
Bold of you to assume the human race will survive past be Y2038 problem
Surely AI will make it easier.
I asked ChatGPT for some potential solutions to the Y10K issue. I particularly enjoyed this suggestion:
Plan for Y10K Early: Build flexible and extensible systems now, with modular design to incorporate future changes seamlessly.
Y10k's gonna be wild
What would Y10K cigarettes be like?
Superweed.
I said this to my father in 98/99ish when we were already updating to four digits anyway and he told me I was crazy.
We'll see who has the last laugh.
