The Unix time is precisely 1234567890
However, even if this binary number would have some interesting patterns, it would hardly affect any kind of computational equipment. Generally, they are only care about overflows, cases when a variable or counter reaches its maximal value and in the next increment it turns into its minimal value. These overflows or wrap arounds, if not handled properly by the softwares using the values of these counters or variables can cause various issues. In case of the Unix operating systems, time is such a counter. Since the Unix systems store the time in the 32-bit time_t integer type (actually it is a signed integer, so the absolute value of this type is 31-bit long) at 03:14:08,19th of January, 2038 this counter will wrap around.
But not all Unix versions will face the issue of this wrap around, Solaris uses a 64-bit type (a long) to represent time_t, so the users of the Solaris OS will have a bit more time to deal with this problem. One can immediately ask, how much time do we have? Well, around 290 billion years. Looks pretty good... Unfortunately, we will have to solve a way more important problem before we will address this one. Based on the current estimations our Sun is around the middle of its lifespan and considering that it is approximately 5 billion years old, it will start its Red Giant phase in around 5 billion years from now, give or take a couple of years. When the Sun turns into a Red Giant, its radius will increase by 250 times and possibly it will reach beyond Earth's orbit. It will simply eat our planet. However, we can be completely sure of the size of the expansion, since our Sun - just like all the stars - is continuously loosing mass due to stellar wind. It is possible, that the mass loss will be large enough to change the fabric of spacetime (gravity) in a way to move the orbits of the planets of our solar system outerwards enough to not swallow the Earth. But even in this case, all fluid water will evaporate from Earth and our planet will not be habitable any more [Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited]. So we have to solve this problem first by relocating mankind to have at least a single computer that can operate long enough to reach 290 billion years.
I feel like I must be an ubergeek, because I find numerical patterns like these fascinating. However, thankfully I'm not under the mistaken impression that they're anything other than just numbers. :)
Posted by Randall Krause on February 13, 2009 at 05:08 PM CET #