Digital archaeologists in a distant future are going to think a lot more happened on 1 Jan 1970 than actually happened.
If you’re a time‑traveler, a data‑curator, or just someone who can’t pronounce “epoch” correctly, this one’s for you.
A bunch of internet denizens recently stumbled across a quirky Reddit thread that made us all wonder: what if future archivists, poking through the dusty digital relics of the 21st century, were to look at our timestamps and think the entire universe kicked off on New Year’s Day 1970? It turns out the answer is a resounding yes, because that’s exactly what the Unix epoch is, and it’s become the de‑facto standard for counting seconds on computers worldwide. In other words, the moment the Internet turned from a hobbyist network into a global behemoth, every millisecond that followed has been measured in seconds since midnight UTC, 1 January 1970.
Why does this matter? Because if someone in the year 3024 opens a hard drive from 2024 and reads the raw timestamps, they might see a mountain of data stamped with “0” seconds or “1 000 000 000” seconds and conclude that the entire history of our digital age is a single, massive event that happened on that one day. Spoiler: it’s not. It’s just a convenient baseline that allows us to talk about dates, log events, and debug code without having to reinvent the wheel every time.
The conversation that followed the original post is a delightful mix of book recommendations, gentle explanations of how epochs work, a touch of absurdity, and the occasional attempt to explain a swallow’s air‑speed velocity. Let’s dive into the comments (with no usernames, because that’s the spirit of the blog) and see what the Reddit community had to say.
There's a really good book series that features 'digital archaeologists' of a sort and they start their calendar at this time as a fun little nod
"A Fire Upon The Deep" check it out it's great
I really enjoyed that book! I think about the "zones of thought" often. Thanks for reminding me of the name.
I hate that I have absolutely no idea what this post means and am apparently too simple for any of the replies to give me context clues. Can someone give me an ELI5?
Most computers handle time the same way: there is an "epoch" (pronounced epic), or starting time, in a certain time zone. and then the count the seconds since then. For example, the current time is 1765930369 seconds since the epoch (plus a few seconds for me to type this out).
The epoch these computers use is midnight on January 1st, 1970 (using the UTC time zone, which is, for ELI5 purposes, the same time zone as GMT but doesn't do daylight savings).
Often missing dates, erroneously calculated dates, or other similar issues in a dataset can result in a time of "0" being logged (or another value that is interpreted as a 0 in calculations), which is the epoch time
Thank you! Are these epochs standardized? When does the next one start? What about all the digital data before 1970? Why does this suggest so much of our current information age will be timestamped 1/1/70? What is the air speed velocity of an unladen Swallow?
TL;DR
Future data‑archivists will probably think the 1970 New Year’s Day was a cosmic event, because that’s the epoch that powers our timestamps. The comments range from book recommendations to explanations of why computers use 1 Jan 1970 as the “zero” point, and a classic “air‑speed velocity of a swallow” joke that just never dies. Stay tuned for more time‑traveling hilarity!