Remember the Y2K crisis? We thought society was going to collapse because we hadn’t trained our computers for the future.
Well, it’s going to happen again. We’re going to run out of Social Security numbers.
Your number is unique; it’s not recycled when you die. About a billion numbers are possible, but we’ve been assigning them since 1936 and we’ve already used up about a third of the possibilities. According to some estimates we could run out by 2075.
What happens then? Who knows? But if our government collapses, head to South Korea: Their social security numbers give access to online video games.