Well, the importance of binary computers is likely to remain for a long time – there's been some claims that ternary computers would have been more efficient, but we've got so much technical improvement invested in binary architecture that they won't catch up for a long time, if ever.
Hmm – quarternary? Disadvantage is that thirds don't come out even, but otherwise it's pretty decent. 13.7 billion decimal (11 digits) has 16 quits (heh!), which is a little long, but with only 4 symbols we may be able to write them smaller.
(Actually, I think SI measurements would convert automatically if we just renamed the kilogram. That done, we could just make new prefixes for powers in 4 or 6 or whatever.)
Backward compatibility is pretty important, I suppose, but we managed to abandon Roman numerals all right. And compatibility with finger counting, as you pointed out, doesn't change with senary. The only question is whether it's enough of an improvement to overwhelm cultural inertia.
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timeasmymeasure
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Hmm – quarternary? Disadvantage is that thirds don't come out even, but otherwise it's pretty decent. 13.7 billion decimal (11 digits) has 16 quits (heh!), which is a little long, but with only 4 symbols we may be able to write them smaller.
(Actually, I think SI measurements would convert automatically if we just renamed the kilogram. That done, we could just make new prefixes for powers in 4 or 6 or whatever.)
Backward compatibility is pretty important, I suppose, but we managed to abandon Roman numerals all right. And compatibility with finger counting, as you pointed out, doesn't change with senary. The only question is whether it's enough of an improvement to overwhelm cultural inertia.
Which, of course, it is not.