it's going to be hard to get to 40k if we don't keep counting through the 10s.

People already abbreviate to the last two digits when appropriate, so it's not hard to imagine people doing the same for bigger numbers.

For keeping track of stuff electronically, we're pretty much set too. 64 bit unix time will take us well over 100 billion years.

Seeing as the current year is 12,023 I'm gonna say: Yes.

Can't wait for the drama to patch Windows XP to survive y10k.

There are a lot of things it depends on.

First is whether we are still using the same calendar base date. The currently accepted international system is based on Christendom, but there are other calendars out there with different dates. You could see a switch over if another group becomes more dominant. Or you could get another system implemented entirely; France tried to change its base year to the French Revolution.

Second is if Earth is the only human inhabited planet. We are already seeing that the Martian day throws a lot of coordination up in the air, and that is without having human bases there. It is possible that Mars develops its own calendar that better fits Martian time. At that point, the only link for calendars across humanity would be the Unix Epoch.

A000 is next

They'll just go to A001, thus pushing back the problem for 26,000 more years.

A new robot Messiah will arrive in 8630 so our year 10000 aC will be their 1370 aR

No I think time will just stop.

Or we are in the year 12023

There’s already a movement to call it the 10000s because that’s about how long ago we had the idea to have permanent settlements

I would hope that time and date formats would be redesigned by that point. If we would live to y10k, I'd expect a lot of space colonization. At that point, I'd expect there to be some other point of reference to define timestamps.

Why would that be a problem? We already often only use the last two digits to refer to the year, that'll probably not change.

What’s going to happen, is that I’m going to start a Humanist cult, and they’re going to name the new age after me.

They’ll call it “the year of our salvation.” They just misremember everything, and think I was some hero. The reality is I’m an asshole and should never be trusted leading a quasi-religious crusade.

Y10k bug will end society

I don't see why not. 5 digits isn't too bad, and the issue wouldn't come up again for another 90,000 years after that. Besides, we'll probably extinct ourselves through climate change, nuclear war, and/or AI long before then anyways.

Astronomers already use Julian Dates for various reasons. Right now it's 2460261.2834606, it'll be later by the time you read this. Julian dates/times are fractional days starting from January 1st, 4713 B.C. = 0. Just keep counting up from there.

By then, I don't think that the use of earth's orbital period around the sun would make sense as a unit of measurement. It is important to track the seasons if you're living in an agricultural society. But the orbital period of the earth is not consistent across time, nor the time it takes for the earth to rotate. It doesn't make a good unit of measurement. And don't get me started on leap years, leap seconds, negative leap seconds, timezones and daylight saving times...

I'd prefer to base the new unit of time based on "Plank time". About 10^44 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 12^41 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It's about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (12^43) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (12^45) is about 1.8 hours. 12 of these (12^46) could be the equivalent of a day, 12 of that could be an equivalent of a week, and you can find an equivalent for a year. The duodecimal is unnecessary, but it makes division a bit neater. Now peak a date well before the beginning of human history to avoid the need for negative years (BC / AD) and that's it.

That way you get a single number that you can manipulate arithmetically. Not like yyyy/mm/dd format where each part is a different length.

Beyond maybe needing some sort of space calendar if we ever actually get off this rock in a way that matters, why not? An extra digit isnt all that big of a hassle.

We'll probably have a Calendar system switch to a new major event

Well, no reason not to add a digit after 9999.

But yeah, at some point we ought to stop using years. It's the second that is standardized, and the year is all off. I can't imagine we reaching 9999, but the change has no relation to the extra digit and no reason to happen anywhere near it.

According to Zager and Evans, the year 9595 will pretty much be it.

https://piped.video/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA

Nah, we'll never get there. (When we do, major Y10K crisis. 💣💥)