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
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.
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!!)
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…
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
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.
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.
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.”