A double would be even worse. That would consolidate an insane level of accuracy near whatever the epoch for the system was, and have equally insanely large le

A double would be even worse. That would consolidate an insane level of accuracy near whatever the epoch for the system was, and have equally insanely large leaps the further away from the epoch someone is. In modern systems "a double-precision (64-bit) binary floating-point number has a coefficient of 53 bits (including 1 implied bit), an exponent of 11 bits, and 1 sign bit. " (Wikipedia since I had to look up the exact details).