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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Er, saying the birth date of Jesus is off by a few years isn’t the same as saying he didn’t exist at all.
Our AD system of years was devised in the 6th century by a dude Dionysius Exiguus who probably wanted to replace an existing dating system based on the reign of Diocletian, the Era of Martyrs.
But no one really knows how Dionysius worked it out exactly, or if he even actually used the birth date and not some other shit like nativity. The bible itself doesn’t give exact dates, people commonly dated it by a passage saying he was about 30 during the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, so you have to work out how long ago Tiberius’ reign was and then go from there, but it also doesn’t say he was exactly 30…
Then there’s other shit like how the diocletian era system had a different start date and some confusion over exact ruling lengths of emperors which would mess up counting back through the years.
So this, coupled with scholars trying to figure out dates of things in the bible based on trying to date events mentioned like the census has led to biblical scholars dating the birth to like 4 or 5 BC and that the dude who was trying to figure that out 600 years after the event got it a bit wrong.
It’s wiki so not the greatest source, but this article goes over most the issues about trying to date the birth
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus
And another about trying to date other events:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus
Dating ancient events can be tricky when people were using different dating systems based on shit like when roman consuls or emperors reigned, or when the Olympics happened, or from years since the biblical creation (anno mundi, still used in the Hebrew calendar for religious purposes).
Adoption of the AD system of counting years by most of Europe by the 10th century has made dating since then a lot easier. But even then you have some annoyances like the adoption of the Gregorian calendar which not everyone did at the same time or in the same way leading to differences of up to 2 weeks between the different systems: like how the Russian February Revolution of 1917 actually took place in March because the Russians refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar until after they overthrew the tsar, and a bunch of Orthodox Christians still use the Julian calendar for the dates of religious holidays like Christmas.
So to end this long rambling diatribe: dating old shit ain’t an exact science and dates of ancient events can be a bit blurry.
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?
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.
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.
Holocene Calendar is the one used by those Kurzgesagt calendars.
