If you thought the Y2K bug had a lot of world ending potential, you might want to skip this post right now. If we don't blow ourselves up by 2038, the end of the world is going to have little to do with nukes and a lot to do with Unix because Unix systems can't keep track of the date past January 19, 2038.

According to Y2K38.info, Unix keeps track of the date and time using a four byte integer that represents the number of seconds past January 1, 1970. The integer can only get so big before having to restart from zero. If a machine can't restart it's time, which may be the case for many Unix systems, it will crash. Hackosis confirms this problem has the potential to affect Linux boxes too. Unfortunately, machines running on *nix operating systems act as the backbone for much of the cyber-world, meaning we may see anything from planes falling out of the sky to the internet shutting down when this hits.

Are you scared yet? Probably not, and neither are we. 2038 is far, far away, and it's very unlikely that we'll be using the same technology for pretty much anything when the year comes. Also, there's way too much money to be lost to a simple little bug, and no company's going to stand by and let that happen. Finally, keep in mind that Y2K38.info has been around since before the year 2000, meaning the author wrote much of the content on the site without seeing the results of the Y2K bug. However, the site is still up, so the author must believe it's still a problem. For those interested, the site is headlined by a countdown timer in binary, decimal, and date forms, which are definitely worth checking out if you're into ones and zeros.