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Is there a scientific calendar which uses a different reference than Jesus?

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?

Weirdmusic ,
@Weirdmusic@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe a calendar that starts with the creation of the Earth (approx 4 billion years ago) as it’s starting point?

AbidanYre ,

Like that joke about the T-Rex that’s 65 million and 10 years old.

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

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.

stoneparchment ,
@stoneparchment@possumpat.io avatar

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: …wikipedia.org/…/Template:Year_in_various_calenda…

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

stardustpathsofglory OP ,

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

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

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.

SpaceNoodle ,

Unix time. Zero is midnight UTC on 1 January 1970.

lemmyng ,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

cfi ,

Gregorian calendar, surely

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

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?

JCSpark ,
@JCSpark@lemmy.ca avatar

ISO 8601 for the win!

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

AbouBenAdhem ,

See the Julian day.

stardustpathsofglory OP ,

Very interesting. Thank you!

someguy3 ,

Chinese calendar?

TootSweet ,

I don’t know of any books I can recommend, but I’d definitely be down for 13 months with one being short. We could do 12 months of 30 days each plus a 13th month of 5 (or on leap years 6) days.

As far as anything that exists today, there is the Unix Timestamp which is defined as the number of seconds since (the entirely arbitrary time of) midnight January 1st 1970 UTC. Of course, “1970” only makes sense in the context of the Gregorian calendar which still has to do with the birth of Jesus. So, it’s not exactly what you’re looking for. But maybe it’s at least more removed from “the birth of Jesus” than the Gregorian calendar we all generally use.

I guess if you’re interested in this stuff, you might be interested in learning about ISO-8601, a standard way of representing dates/times in text. And also the concept of “leap seconds” and things like Leap Smearing.

There’s also a great short story about someone trying to explain to an alien with no familarity with earth how our calendar works, but I’m having trouble finding it now. I’ll edit this post with a link if I can find it.

ShrimpCurler ,

Why would you have 30 days in those months? I’m a fan of having exactly 4 weeks each month (28 days), across 13 months. Then every month is the same. If the 1st is on a Monday, then the 1st of every month will always be a Monday. You just need to add a leap week in every now and again.

HubertManne ,

just reduce the week to 6 days and every month is exactly 5 weeks

HubertManne ,

Id rather intersped the days as out of month days. 4 for the equinoxes and solsti but not sure where to put the fifth although I lean toward an extra one after the winter solsctice as the new year.

GenderNeutralBro ,

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: 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.

observantTrapezium ,
@observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca avatar

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!!)

SpaceNoodle ,

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.

marcos ,

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.

observantTrapezium ,
@observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca avatar

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).

LucidBoi ,

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…

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

Maybe we are currently living in a BC era and year 0 hasn't happened yet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion

hperrin ,

Holocene Calendar is the one used by those Kurzgesagt calendars.

WoahWoah ,

CE and BCE. Same thing different name. shrug

PhlubbaDubba ,

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

SlopppyEngineer ,

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.

PhlubbaDubba ,

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.

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