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”.