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?
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.
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 agree with you, but I’m still curious.
How do we handle dates before epoch 0?
Edit: I guess we’ll use negative numbers.
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.
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)
CE and BCE. Same thing different name. shrug