Paraphrasing Jay‑Z: If your time_t is 32-​bit, I feel bad for you, son. I got 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 prob­lems but an Epochalypse ain’t one

Follow-​up: Paul Bennett on Facebook asks, ​“When are we going to move to 128-​bit signed inte­ger epoch sec­onds with a 128-​bit IEEE 754 float­ing point off­set in sec­onds?”

I’m not sure how use­ful quadruple-​precision float­ing point sec­onds are, but as for epoch sec­onds, Trond Endrestøl con­clud­ed in a March 2015 blog that we would need to move by ear­ly December in the year 292,277,026,596. It would­n’t be much of a year, though, as the sun will have long ago engulfed the Earth (so how do you mea­sure a year?), our entire Local Group of galax­ies will have merged into one super-​galaxy, and all the oth­er galax­ies will have reced­ed out­side the observ­able uni­verse.

So 292 gigayears should be enough for any­one (that’s still rec­og­niz­ably human), just as 640 kilo­bytes was once ​“enough for any­one”.