Can someone explain to me the reason for including a leading zero? Is that just a stylist choice of the long now foundation?
> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
Dark era starts in 10^106 years time, or about 10^157 plank times, so any time can be respresented in 20 bytes.
Just 44 bytes will allow encoding of any point in spacetime, and they are using far more than that to simply encode years.
>2.4.2 Transcending Environmental Considerations
>However, we might get lucky. So, Y10K dates are able to represent any possible time without any limits to their range either in the past or future.
500 billion years is barely half way through the star forming age of the universe.
... I wonder if all those COBOL systems still running will have the developers then to deal with the problem....
Does it come across as kind of arrogant? Yes. Like the PhD who will go out of his way to correct you if you address him as Mr., not Dr.
That said, they do that because it's _longnow_