The End of Time

We often talk about dates and timekeeping as extraordinarily difficult tasks. And, at least in part, that may have to do with their origins as legacy technologies in the most legacy sense: we have strong evidence of calendar systems all the way back into the Neolithic period, and maybe some hints of them as far back as the Paleolithic. Literally, stone age technology, still in use today.

I wonder if that’s why calendar’s hold such a mystical hold over us? Many of us likely remember the New Age predictions that 2012 was going to mark the end of the world or some great reconfiguration of the world, simply because it marked the end of a cycle in the Mayan Calendar. Before that, prophecies centered on the year 2000, not just because of the Y2K bug, but simply because it’s a round number and people felt like that’s a good place to call it. Before that, there was the astrological predictions of the Age of Aquarius (which may fall anywhere from 1844 to sometime in the 24th century, but was real popular for a minute in the 60s and 70s). And we can walk farther back into history, finding eschatological predictions centered around significant dates.

Will some future society see the Y2K38 bug as a similar marker of the End Times™? And when that passes, will they turn to this prediction, found in Etienne‘s codebase?

tempDate = DateTime.Parse(dr["Start_Date"].ToString(), auCulture.DateTimeFormat);

if (tempDate.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy") == "31/12/3000")

You’ve heard it here first: December 31st, 3000, is the End of Time. Most importantly, if you’re into this sort of thing, is that this code was committed to the code base in 2012. Which clearly shows us that 2012 was just the first step in a cosmic transformation that will end time as we know it by the 31st century. And this prediction has just as much veracity and predictive power as every other such prediction, so you’ve been warned. Prepare yourselves, for the end times will be upon us… well after you and I are all dead.