Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them
If by “UNIX time” you mean store timestamps as seconds (minus number-of-leap-seconds, currently 27) since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, that epoch is still technically defined in terms of the christian epoch, and, worse, it is also defined in terms of UTC which wasn’t even really standardized until 1972 and which periodically needs to have leap seconds inserted by the Earth Rotation Service. At least they have a cool logo:
We should probably just admit to the aliens that we didn’t even have a very precise definition of a “second” until 3 BUE (Before UNIX Era) but then we can tell them about TAI64, TAI64N, and TAI64NA and Circular T and then they’ll see that we’re at least starting to get serious.
It will be much easier if we can manage to abolish daylight savings time before we have to explain that too.
If by “UNIX time” you mean store timestamps as seconds (minus number-of-leap-seconds, currently 27) since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, that epoch is still technically defined in terms of the christian epoch, and, worse, it is also defined in terms of UTC which wasn’t even really standardized until 1972 and which periodically needs to have leap seconds inserted by the Earth Rotation Service. At least they have a cool logo:
We should probably just admit to the aliens that we didn’t even have a very precise definition of a “second” until 3 BUE (Before UNIX Era) but then we can tell them about TAI64, TAI64N, and TAI64NA and Circular T and then they’ll see that we’re at least starting to get serious.
It will be much easier if we can manage to abolish daylight savings time before we have to explain that too.
pretty sure unix time began with the creation of the universe in the 1970 🤨