About 12 years ago there was a considerable panic about the so-called Year-2000-Bug. This was a potential problem in computer systems caused by the programs running on them being fit only for dates up to the year 2000. The exact reasons why people thought there would be a problem are due to the way that computers handle dates and are fairly complex, but in effect people believed that as soon as the last second on December 31st 1999 passed then planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear arsenals would spontaneously fire at their targets and fridges the world over would cease to work. This turned out not to be true in the end and I don't think it's known widely why - perhaps a combination of media frenzy (it's a good story) and IT professionals making a bit of extra wonga.
The phenomenon seems to have gone from the public consciousness. Not mine though. The issue of computer programs being fit for purpose has never gone away and perhaps it's only good fortune that we can't think 1000 years hence to the next Millennium Bug. We can, however, predict in our children's lifetimes a proliferation both physically and mechanically across our solar system - Moon bases, Mars bases, Titan outposts, some populated by humans and some not.
Are computer designers today thinking about the implications of where their code may end up in 50 years? I doubt it very much. It's probably less of a problem these days compared with the causes of the Y2K problem - which lie in the 1960s - because there is more awareness, however some things spring to mind.
Of course organisations such as NASA already have to deal with this sort of problem, however this has yet to trickle down to the rest of the computing industry except for a few forward-thinking groups.
I worry for the CEO or CTO of the future. When viewing statistics across the whole solar system group how will they view correctly the time/date-based attribute hierarchies of their MOLAP systems?! At the moment Earth-based data considers a year to be 365 Earth-days (or perhaps 365.25 to be more precise). This will not be the same on Mars. The Martian year is about 687 Earth-days long. Fortunately the Martian day is just over 24 Earth-hours so that should be easily converted.
If you're living on Mars and updating your Facebook status then the how will the update time be displayed to someone on Earth? There are already mechanisms that mimic UTC on a solar-system scale, but are people ready for that?
Is it about time that computer practitioners were made more aware? This is, of course, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but a more serious problem for the West may be that conversion of Western natural language and calendars (English, French, Gregorian, Hebrew etc) into Chinese equivalents (if they exist) is lacking too. If the current trend of space-exploration being led by China continues then those software programs that can't convert in this way will not survive.
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