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Not only that, it happened a long long time ago. I'm no astronomer; would that be more or less supernovae?

Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.

I suspect you're thinking of a double (floating point). A long long is only a 64 bit integer.

2^64 planck times is 9.9e-25 seconds. Planck times are really tiny.

2^64 nanoseconds is 584 years.

Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length.

The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range.

Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.

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