Category: [Science & technology]

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…

Apparently we are now at the halfway point of the orbit of Halley’s comet, where it starts to swing back in our direction from wherever it goes to, and it’ll be in our vicinity again in 2021.

By that time I’ll be in my late 80s, if I’m still alive, which I don’t expect to be. Then again, I’m surprised every time another birthday rolls around, so I could surprise myself in 38 years. I’ll be even more surprised if I can actually see the thing then, though; I have a feeling that diabetes will have claimed my eyesight long before. Might have to be content with having barely seen it back in 1986 (I don’t actually remember much about it, to be honest; the NASA picture above is better than I recall it being).

That said, the thing that’ll surprise me even more is if there’s anyone else going to be paying attention to it next time it comes round. I don’t know whether predictions of the end of human civilisation by 2050 are accurate (I suspect they may even be unduly optimistic), but if they are I feel like Halley’s return might be low on people’s priorities. Humanity is, as always, welcome to prove me wrong…