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?
Unix time. Zero is midnight UTC on 1 January 1970.
Technically the choice of 1st January 1970 is itself a reference to the gregorian calendar
It’s not a reference to anything, it’s just a moment in time.
I agree with you, but I’m still curious.
How do we handle dates before epoch 0?
Edit: I guess we’ll use negative numbers.
More importantly, how will we handle dates further than 19 January 2038 with Unix time?
We’ll just make a new Unix time on 19 January 2038.
Unix Time 2: 2 Fast, 2 Furious.
With blackjack and hookers.
128 bits?
64 bit counters are enough
Depends what you count. Seconds? Milliseconds? Nanoseconds?
I was using that as a common reference to something with which we’re already familiar.
often use it as my birthday to crash poorly written scripts. zeros are fun to inject
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.
Many things us humans do are “unfortunate” because we don’t know any better. 2000 years from know, humans might say that it was “unfortunate” that humans used fossil fuels, or wore high heels. Instead of regretting the past, be the change you want to be.
The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there’s no way around that as it’s not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.
As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.
But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I’m not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it’s universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what “August 5, 2024” means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).
That’s more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I’m looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)
The second best thing about US customary units is that they are now defined by metric units.
The most best thing will be when they finally go away.
although August might have to be translated to the target language
Funnily enough, Augustus being a person’s name¹, anybody that uses those same months will understand without translation.
1 - Well, ok, a personal title. Even more funnily, a claim of being god… that’s completely independent from the one the OP is concerned about.
Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).
Wow I just realised something crazy. August in Ukrainian is серпень, while srpanj in Croatian is July. July in Ukrainian is липень, while lipanj in Croatian means June. I wonder why they’re shifted like this…
Maybe for a similar reason that Oktoberfest is in September
And what is that reason?
The YouTube Channel Kurzgesagt has proposed a calendar based on the 'Human Era’ (HE) instead of before/after christ format.
It’s based on the first monument of large-scale human cooperation (building a temple in modern-day turkey) and is quite elegant in my opinion. It ‘simply’ adds 10.000 years to the calendar we’re all already used to. :)
Kiugessgt was good before they started listing all the ways humanity is doomed. I just can’t watch it anymore.
Don’t worry! Technology can fix everything!
This video is sponsored by the Bill Gates Foundation.
Can’t stand for this Melinda Gates erasure.
Special bronze sponsor by crowdstrike. Crowdstrike: we are proactive and won’t let no virus or hacker take your system down if we can do it ourselves.
I’ve been buying one every year since they came out. I love how the week starts on Monday.
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I’m always intrigued by this sort of hypothesis, can you recommend a good link to an alternative explanation for the early church?
Like I get that early Christians worked in a lot (LOT) of existing mythology to make Christianity palatable/ relatable to various local groups. But where could the early Christians have come from if not a Jesus like figure?
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Might want to do your own research on the historical existence of Jesus. I might be wrong, but I think there is evidence if a man having a really lived and fitting Jesus’ story. Don’t just listen to random dudes in the intern because they wrote a long text and linked Wikipedia!
My question was in regard to the part of the comment:
{The Birth of Jesus} …if it happened at all, which is up for debate…
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Yeah I get that there isn’t much direct evidence of Jesus. But when you say “Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular” aren’t you referring to his persecution of Christians?
I thought my question was pretty simple: if Jesus didn’t exist, where did the early Christians (that Saul was persecuting) come from?
We have letters from Paul, because he sent them to other Christian communities. Where did those communities come from?
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
Came here to say this. It’s an easy reference for most, so it makes sense why they kept it.
There is literally nothing wrong with BC and AD. If you can’t accept it because ‘muh religion bad’ you need serious help
A bit sensitive about religion, are we?
Also I need to point that there’s nothing scientific about year 0 matching up the birth of some dude, no matter who he/she/them is. Equally important scientifically is the eruption of a random volcano or the birth of a different dude. Or the death of one . Many calendars start when someone started being king, which usually coincides with their father’s death.
There’s nothing scientific about February having 28 days, but it would be an unnecessary pain in the ass to change it at this point.
Would it actually?
On this point, it would be stupidly hard.
Just from a programming and software perspective. All the old code that runs banks and the back end of air travel. It barely runs as it is, do a switch up of years, even leaving the months alone and it would probably freak out. Standadize the months while you are at it and the whole thing falls apart.
Are you old enough to remember Y2K? That required a lot of techs to spend a huge amount of time fixing code that was never intended to see years change from 19xx to now just even consider 20xx.
That is before we go about changing paper Birth Documents, marriage documents, house deads, … Should I go on?
Sounds like a good way to fix these mass layoffs in tech.
I like your optimism, fairly unrealistic but the optimism is nice to see
Haha I would talk about to time keeping in sw but glad I don’t to anymore
How would you go about changing it and what would be the value in doing so?
I remind you about the difficulty we are currently having eliminating Daylight Savings which requires actual effort to maintain
Quite simple.
We change February to a 29 day month, and all the others to 28 days, then add a month named after the greatest person to ever live, DragonTypeWyvern. This results in 13 28 day months, and eliminates numerous scheduling mistakes and saves quite a lot of time, on the scale of the rest of human history (hopefully).
Some say to have a separate global holiday with the extra day instead of putting it in February, with it extended to a two day holiday on Leap Years, however making February the longest month is funny.
That doesn’t answer how you would get everyone to go along with it. Every program with dates needs to be rewritten. I once again remind you the difficulty in getting rid of Daylight Savings time which requires effort on people to maintain and causes documented problems every year.
You also haven’t explained why this would be worth the hassle of doing so.
I did not say it would be difficult to develop a better system, I said it would be incredibly difficult to implement a better system.
Simple. Just do it and ignore everyone who cries about it.
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.
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!
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
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.
That would create a problem for billing and rent. $2000/month becomes $6500/a quarter. And people who only get paid monthly would not be able to stretch that properly. Many people have bad financial skills.
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.
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.
Holocene Calendar is the one used by those Kurzgesagt calendars.
