Consider that every culture's predominant method of writing has undergone significant changes over a given millennia long period. I'm not about to confuse the date on a photograph of a wax tablet for a modern one.
Right. But the long now format is a rarity, and doesn't look like it's ever going to become the norm. If someone from the far future stumbles upon it, they may well not know what millennium it comes from. It's just some date in an unknown format.
That's like supposing that I (in the modern day) would stumble upon an ancient sumerian date formatted in a slightly unusual manner (for the time), lack the context to identify the approximate era, but somehow if it had been written without the extra character (or whatever) I would have been able to figure things out.
Either a future archeologist has sufficient context to localize the writing to within plus or minus 5k years or the situation was hopeless to begin with. In all likelihood the latin script itself will be sufficient. In the unlikely event that latin numerals remain in near continuous use for another 100k years the writing system alone would then prove insufficient but hopefully you see my point.
That said, it seems the latin alphabet has been in use for 2700 years and is used by approximately 70% of the global population at this point so I guess if any alphabet is going to survive that far into the future it's one of the top contenders. But even then the scripts and usage conventions have changed drastically since its advent. Do we really expect anyone to be employing anything that even vaguely resembles a present day font face that far into the future?
