I'm just saying it is better to make no assumptions here than to make the same mistakes that led to UTF-16's accidental brokenness. There are certainly jokes t

I'm just saying it is better to make no assumptions here than to make the same mistakes that led to UTF-16's accidental brokenness. There are certainly jokes that emoji's current rate of expansion could be in the billions by the end of the decade. Every time we think we have a handle on "all" of human languages we make new interesting discoveries of past languages or hidden present languages or an indigenous populace declares a need for a script they can truly call their own rather than whatever ugly mix of Latin letters some missionaries thought appropriate in the cultural insensitive past or a populace has an uprising and declares a revolutionary new start or… That's just human languages. I'm sure we'd have a ton of problems if we ever started trying to encode non-human languages. I don't think we're in danger yet of discovering that dolphins have a written script for whale languages (or wilder some sort of first contact event with non-terrestial aliens), but our science fiction loves to posit such events happening at any time and as a huge surprise. It would be great if we were at least somewhat prepared for such wild hypotheticals. Yeah, that's outside the "usefully-predictable future", but also I think Unicode has always existed in a place where the future isn't "usefully-predictable". (How many 90s Unicode architects would have predicted emoji? As only one example.)