The Codeless Code: Case 166 Tempus Fugit 
======

 The Clan of Iron Bones had just applied the most recent
upgrades to the Temple’s servers. After examining some files
in /usr/include, host master Yishi-Shing shook his head.

A monk noticed and asked, “Master, do you see some cause for
concern?”

Yishi-Shing said, “The type time_t, by which the current
system time is obtained, has been declared as a signed
long—a mere sixty-four bits.”

Puzzled, the monk started the abacus app on his tablet and
rapidly flicked the beads. “Such a number is capable of
representing roughly two-hundred-and-ninety-two billion
years, forward or backward,” said the monk.

“And this does not trouble you?” asked Yishi-Shing.
“Existence itself will cease in a countable number of
seconds, and even the makers of our operating system taunt
us with this fact!”

The monk considered a moment and said: “Not long ago time_t
was only thirty-two bits—incapable of tallying as little as
two centuries. The type was expanded with only decades
remaining before the Universe’s expiration. I surmise that,
sometime near the end of the next two-hundred-and-ninety-two
billion years, we will receive another patch.”

The master was comforted.

* It is interesting to note that current physics predicts
the heat death of the Universe in no less than 10^100 years,
with a subsequent Big Bang arising perhaps in another
10^(10^56) years.  This means that in order to display our
uptime in seconds right before rebooting the Universe, we
would need time_t to have (3.32e56 + 30) bits. Since planet
Earth only has about 1.33e50 atoms to play with, we’d need
about 2.5 million Earths (or roughly one G-type
main-sequence star) to build a simple register alone. Now,
where can we get a G-type star? Hmmmmm...