I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt’s calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.
Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?
Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be “nice” because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.
Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?
Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.
Take your pick: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars
I personally use “2024 CE” for “common era”, with BCE referring to “before common era”. This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE… A bit of a cop out, but
Anyway have fun, there are lots of options
Edit: also the one you’re referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar
Thank you for your answer and the links! You are right about the Holocene Calendar.
I also think it is unfortunate we did not figure out a better starting point. Therefore the question.
Edit: typo
Thing is that at the time where people were looking for answers in the sky rather than in science, the birth of the messiah was the best possible starting point they could think of. And it took many centuries to get over it (with quite a few still being stuck in the past), so it’s really hard to collectively move on to something better. And at this point I’m not even sure “better” wouldn’t be anything but simply different for the sake of being different.
Historians don’t use “BC” and “AD”. Haven’t for a while now.
While the arbitrary date remains the same (year zero), it’s C.E. (common era) or B.C.E. (Before common era)
FYI
I don’t think there’s any way to count years without rooting it somewhere arbitrary. We cannot calculate the age of the planet, the sun, or the universe to the accuracy of a year (much less a second or nanosecond). We cannot define what “modern man” is to a meaningful level of accuracy, either, or pin down the age of historical artifacts.
Most computers use a system called “epoch time” or “UNIX time”, which counts the seconds from January 1, 1970. Converting this into a human-friendly date representation is surprisingly non-trivial, since the human timekeeping systems in common use are messy and not rooted in hard math or in the scientific definition of a second, which was only standardized in 1967.
Tom Scott has an amusing video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
There is also International Atomic Time, which, like Unix Time, counts seconds from an arbitrary date that aligns with the Gregorian calendar. Atomic Time is rooted at the beginning of 1958.
ISO 8601 also aligns with the Gregorian calendar, but only as far back as 1582. The official standard does not allow expressing dates before that without explicit agreement of definitions by both parties. Go figure.
The core problem here is that a year, as defined by Earth’s revolution around the sun, is not consistent across broad time periods. The length of a day changes, as well. Humans all around the world have traditionally tracked time by looking at the sun and the moon, which simply do not give us the precision and consistency we need over long time periods. So it’s really difficult to make a system that is simple, logical, and also aligns with everyday usage going back centuries. And I don’t think it is possible to find any zero point that is truly meaningful and independent of wishy-washy human culture.
UNIX time uses a Julian calendar date as a reference, but is independent after that.
As for the 13 month calendar, it’s about as nice as cloverleaf interchanges: appealing because it’s symmetrical, terrible in practice. Having the days of the month always align to the same weekday means leap years would make things even worse because every 4 years the entire calendar shifts. And if you skip the leap day as a holiday then you just make calculating dates from an epoch like UNIX time even more convoluted.
Gregorian calendar, surely
A bigger problem to solve is that depending on where you are, today is 06/08/2024, 08/06/2024, 2024-08-06 … For. The. Same. Day.
So, can we please standardise on 2024-08-06 across the planet before we start considering what 1/1/1 is?
ISO 8601 for the win!
My ideal is dropping the month altogether for 13 week Quarters with the last day being an intercalary outside the week and same for leap days.
If you wanna avoid huge date numbers, break it down further by weeks, so for example my BDay this year would be 3.10.3, third day of the tenth week of the third quarter.
As for year counting, I like Era of History for the current era, dating to the invention of writing, Era of Legend, dating back 100k years to the earliest date that stories we have preserved now would have to date back to, Era of Evolution, which dates back to the development of Life on Earth, Era of Stars which dates back to the birth of the first Stars in the Universe, and finally the Era of Energy, in which the universe was so superheated that large cosmic structures were physically impossible, dating to the Big Bang.
Today’s Date is 3.8.1; 5,224 EoH
You can also make a quarter align with the seasons, so you can just call it spring, winter, …
You can also keep 12 months and make them 30 days each, and add an equinox day in between the seasons. Winter solstice has new year tacked to it and in a leap year summer solstice is two days with the leap year. Keeps it all nicely aligned with the sun.
If you really want you can do weeks of 6 days so each month comes down to exactly 5 weeks of 6 days so the calendar is perfectly reusable each year.
Doesn’t the Southern hemisphere experience winter when we have summer?
Yes.
Also, the Moon is “upside down” too!
Yeah but with the 7 day week you only have 1 or two intercalaries to figure out
6 day weeks leave you with five or six, and having almost a week on average of extra days to make work feels like too much of a nuisance just to be able to keep a unit of measure that doesn’t really serve any actual specificity that you can’t get with the Q-W-D format date.
Barycentric Dynamical Time is one example of an astronomical time standard used in orbital dynamics models requiring consistency across billions of years and relativistic reference frames.
Maybe a calendar that starts with the creation of the Earth (approx 4 billion years ago) as it’s starting point?
Like that joke about the T-Rex that’s 65 million and 10 years old.
Maybe we are currently living in a BC era and year 0 hasn’t happened yet.
Who is this Jesus fellow? Everyone knows that today is a.d. viii Id. Aug. anno MMDCCLXXVII A.U.C.
CE and BCE. Same thing different name. shrug
13 months would be great for salaried employees too (so long as the pay per month isn’t reduced, which, well, of course it will be, but a man can dream)
See the Julian day.
Very interesting. Thank you!
