Intergral Technology Advances in 2038 by Tsian

Intergral Technology Advances in 2038 by Tsian - February 2018 Scholarship Essay

The Year 2038 problem (also known as "Y2K38" by analogy to the Y2K Millennium bug) gains considerable public and media attention this year. It affects programs written in the C programming language. These were relatively immune to the earlier Y2K problem, but suffer instead from the Year 2038 problem. They use a library of routines called the standard time library. This takes a stored, 32-bit integer and interprets the current value as the number of seconds which have passed since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1st January 1970.

Because of the limited number of possible values that can be derived from this 32-bit integer, the farthest time that can be represented in this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19th January 2038. Any times beyond this point will "wrap around" and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems interpret as a date from 1901, rather than 2038. This is called integer overflow.

For older computers that still use this system, major problems begin to arise with file systems and databases, due to erroneous calculations. Fortunately, most systems have been upgraded by now, and little overall damage is done.
By the late 2030s, the worldwide space industry exceeds $1 trillion in size.* This represents a quadrupling compared to 2010* and a tenfold increase since the start of the 21st century. The rapid growth in this sector has been fuelled, in large part, by explosive demand for high-speed Internet services, including the recent establishment of a global, quantum-encrypted satellite network for ultra-secure communications.* However, a number of other areas have started to boom now, including space tourism (via space planes and very high-altitude balloons) and resource extraction from near-Earth asteroids. The latter, while still accounting for only a tiny fraction of global commodities, is now considered a relatively routine activity as the industry is sufficiently mature in technology.

In 1997, private investment in space overtook government spending for the first time. This trend continued into the 21st century, with space becoming more and more commercialised. Access to space was being made cheaper and easier by a new generation of launch vehicles. These and other technological innovations were enabling even small companies to compete and do what only big government agencies had done in the past. Some of the most famous entrepreneurs to emerge during this time included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Diamandis, Robert Bigelow and Richard Branson; but many less well-known individuals and groups were also taking advantage of the changing industry landscape. Crowd-funding, for example, meant that even casual Internet users could now have a stake in the development of space projects – like the new class of "CubeSats". These tiny spacecraft could hitch a ride and piggyback alongside the larger and more expensive missions.

While private commercial enterprises are the dominant driving force, government space agencies still have a role to play. NASA has been developing its manned Mars program and this decade sees its astronauts walking on the Red Planet for the first time. In addition, a number of huge telescopes are being built that dwarf any previous observatory. China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia and other agencies have also made progress in human exploration, with an international collaboration to establish the first base on the Moon.* Meanwhile, new countries are now appearing on the scene and establishing their own national space agencies, as their economies become advanced and rich enough to do so. The number of countries with independent launch capability has also continued to increase.