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?
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.
I’ve been buying one every year since they came out. I love how the week starts on Monday.
I love how the week starts on Monday.
Don’t all calendars start on Monday? I guess calendars in the Middle East might be different as their weekend days are different to those in Europe.
Nope. Portuguese starts with Sunday. Can’t be changed since Monday = segunda which literally means second.
I think because the work week feels like the start of the week, especially when people refer to Saturday and Sunday as the weekend, it is assumed that Monday is the first day of the week. Open the calendar on your phone. It’s Sunday. Can’t speak for all cultures but it’s been that way in the US, “forever.”
Open the calendar on your phone. It’s Sunday.
It’s not, it’s Monday - Monday is the first day of the week here, to be honest I thought that was the same across the western world. TIL I guess!
Really? Well I guess I learned too. Mine is absolutely Sunday. Wonder if it’s a setting. I’m on Android (Zenfone 10)in the US. You?
It’ll just be part of the culture settings - en-GB (I’m in the UK) systems will have the calendars set the first day of the week as Monday.
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 EoR
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.
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.
Doesn’t the Southern hemisphere experience winter when we have summer?
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.
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.
now could always be zero with future positive and past negative. serious refactoring
That is one interesting approach. I like it.
Who is this Jesus fellow? Everyone knows that today is a.d. viii Id. Aug. anno MMDCCLXXVII A.U.C.
The one I am looking for counts the remaining days to total nuclear annihilation.
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.
Birth of Jesus isn’t even accurate. Best guess is that, if it happened at all, which is up for debate, it was around 4 BC.
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…
Well, I’m talking about two different things here, the first being the hypothetical date for Jesus’s birth.
A close reading of the events points to 4 BC as being the year, and the time of year being sometime in Spring “when shepherds watch over their flocks by night.”
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1978QJRAS..19..194S
As for if Jesus was real at all… well, there’s absolutely no contemporaneous evidence from his lifetime that he was ever real, no written record, no first hand account, nothing.
The first mention of Jesus was by Flavius Josephus around 93-94 AD, some 60 years after the Crucifixion, but even that may be a 3rd century insert by a Christian transcriber known as Eusebius of Caesarea.
The problem with the Josephus text is two fold: 1) We don’t have the original, just copies of copies of copies. 2) None of the works quoting Josephus prior to Eusebius make any mention of the Jesus quote which makes it highly suspicious.
The bulk of the New Testament isn’t a result of Jesus at all, it’s all because of Paul, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus.
Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular, then he claimed to have this amazing conversion experience on the road to Damascus, changed his name to Paul, and started talking about this Jesus fellow.
We know Paul existed, we have his letters, other writings, and peers talking about him. How odd none of that exists for Jesus…
A couple of really good books to read about Saul/Paul and the early days:
https://whosoever.org/freeing-jesus-a-review-of-liberating-the-gospels-by-john-shelby-spong/
https://whosoever.org/rescuing-the-bible-from-fundamentalism/
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?
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.
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
I was using that as a common reference to something with which we’re already familiar.
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.
128 bits?
64 bit counters are enough
Depends what you count. Seconds? Milliseconds? Nanoseconds?
There is literally nothing wrong with BC and AD. If you can’t accept it because ‘muh religion bad’ you need serious help
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?
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.
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
A bit sensitive about religion, are we?
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.
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
