Looking at John Coulthart’s blog just now, I saw a link to the Long Now Foundation, which I dimly recall having read about somewhere a while ago… their avowed purpose is to get people thinking about the super long term, with part of their schtick being to add a zero in front of the four-digit year (therefore this year is actually 02023 according to them) to symbolise that. Also, however, according to a footnote on their about page, the zero has an additional purpose:
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.
Apparently the Millennium Bug wasn’t enough for them and they had to hypothesise something even bigger. I mean, full marks for planning ahead, but I can’t help but feel it’s maybe a bit paranoid… for one thing it assumes there’ll still be a human civilisation in 8000 years, and on top of that it’ll still be using the Gregorian calendar rather than something of their own devising (much like how we got rid of ab urbe condita—happy 2776, everyone?). Plus I feel like they might have worked out their own solution by 9999 CE that involves something a bit more elegant than a placeholder digit. The REAL question, of course, is what happens on December 31 99,999 when midnight rolls around…
