Re:Timeline of the far future
by cpeterso on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @06:59PM
(#17562720)
In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky novels, the characters in the far future track time using megaseconds (~11.6 Earth days) to sidestep the problem of days with different lengths. They still count from the 1970-01-01 Unix epoch, but the characters mistakenly think that date is when humans landed on the moon.
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There's also such a thing as a Programmer-Archeologist, can you imagine dealing with 14,000 years of nested dependencies? One key plot point in one of the novels, a totalitarian group is running a omnipresent surveillance network but has no idea about the software running underneath it. They set it up using the GUI and are using it but never looked under the hood. The group attempting to get out from under the grasps of the totalitarians has a programmar-archaeologist who digs into the underpinnings of the software and hijacks it from a lower level of its operating system.
I forgot about the Programmer-Archeologist! Another point from (I think) these novels that stuck with me was Vinge's description of the "software midden heap". I'd like to think we can clean up some middle layers from our computing stack in the future, but with some old software only available in emulators (possibly running in WebAssembly in a browser), I am not so sure.
In fact, I realized I made an nearly identical comment here on Hacker News back in 2011. :)
The Matrix expanded-universe also has some surprisingly deep and complex lore regarding such interactions between the humans and machines and everything between and around them. Those movies and their spinoffs are worth revisiting now and then.