• CAKEDate

CAKEDate

A CAKEDate is a 64-bit unsigned number containing the number of milliseconds since the epoch, defined as January 1st, 1970 00:00:00 UTC. This is enough to represent dates up to 580 million years in the future. I chose milliseconds because on the scale of global communication, that's about the smallest timeslice that makes sense. It takes light a millisecond to travel 300 kilometers (186 miles), so the vast majority of the people you're communicating with are more than a millisecond away from you anyway.

What I hope happens is that people will eventually (in few centuries) decide that the Epoch needs to be rolled over, and will use a sort of sliding window of cleaning up and archiving really old data so the Epoch can eventually be moved with no ill effects. Perhaps, in a few centuries, our concept of time will be so obsolete that the concept of a CAKEDate will seem bizarre or silly.