It's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
It’s so arbitrary. We have at least a few hundred million years before Earth is entirely uninhabitable. Why not use 000001931, then? Not ambitious enough, I guess.
Our written history already goes back over 6,000 years. We can actually understand what people back then wrote. We don’t need unbroken year numbering, or leading zeros, to understand that. The calendar has been reset and changed multiple times. It seems like a mis-focus on something that doesn’t really matter.
I don't see it as a serious attempt to create a better way to write down the year. To me, it's a whimsical attempt to give the reader a little pause to think about long time periods, which is what this project is all about. That makes me smile and remember that I'm just a small spec of dust, not to be taken too seriously in the grand scheme of things. I like it.
