Why not calculate the number of bits necessary before Sol goes supernova? The clock will only be as useful as long as the local star lasts, and when different star systems get populated they or their planets will use local clocks as well.

In theory laws could be authored requiring entities to register pragmatic assumptions with foreseeable violation dates, so that they can be added to a sorted queue of assumption violations to be crossed.

Pretty sure a 64-bit integer gets us to the death of our sun with several powers of 10 left over.

Sol won’t ever go nova, though, so I’m not sure how one would calculate the number of seconds until that happens.

Y2038, meanwhile, is just an artifact of the limitations of older hardware.