System call conversion for year 2038

The trouble with a 64-bit signed nanosecond representation of time is that 30 bits are needed for nanosecond precision, meaning only 2 bits are added to the number of representable seconds. While this does mean quadrupling the current range of ±68 years to ±272 years, designing our clocks to "only" be able to represent times between the years 1698 and 2242 seems a little short-sighted.

If we doubled the size just one more time, with 64-bit seconds (±10^12 years) and 64-bit sub-second-precision (10^-18s), we could handle all almost any time anyone would wish to theoretically manipulate.

Transistor density, and therefore memory sizes, have increased by a factor on the order of a million since the early '70s when time_t was first invented. Surely we can afford to more than just double the size of our timestamps?