Now that the west has moved away from Christiantity to securism, wouldn't it be a good idea to stop using the year system that counts up from Jesus Christ's supposed birth? The current year system started by monks in the 5th century, isn't it time we moved on? But what could we change it to? Here are some suggestions:

Ab urbe conidita

AUC means since the founding of Rome. It counts up from when the Ancient Romans thought Rome had been founded by Romulus and Remus, starting in 753 BC, making the current year 2769 AUC.

Counting up from Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece being the birth place of western civilisation, this might be the best place to the start the calender. But the biggest problem is that no one know when it stared so it would be just a case of adding a random 1,000 or so years.

Holocene Calander

This just adds 10,000 years to the current system because the Holoscene Epoch occused back then.

Country specific

Or every country should just have their own calender counting up from some big national event or from when the country was founded. They tried to bring this system in in France after the revolution but it was unpopular. In the USA they could start the calander from independance, so the year there would be 240USAC (United States of America Calender). Every country would have their own calander and when you mentioned a year you'd have to specify which one you were talking about like "I was born on March 10th 200USAC, but moved France in 220USAC, which is also 205FRC. But I spent two years in Australia in the year 99ACT, which is also 209FRC and 226USAC."

I've been drinking for several hours and that's my excuse.

Why should we change a perfectly working system just to accommodate a new 'secular' world. Everything would be thrown in to chaos as dates clashed and calender's varied massively.

Do we also consider the 10 month Roman calendar or the correct 12 month Gregorian calendar?

What about the massive difference in years?

Jewish - 5776
Christian 2016
Islamic 1438

The current system works perfectly well and each religion can have their own silly numbering system as well.

Would computer programmes handle numerous dating systems?

Finally you are Starry Rune and I claim my £5

We're on the Julian calendar, but now't to stop anyone who wants from privately reverting to the Gregorian one, from days gone by, if they don't like gladiator films, invading other countries, Mithras, feeding christians to lions, toga parties, and other similar Roman Empire stuff ........

I work on Unix time. It's about 1482290800 at the moment.

It's fine as it is. This would just be changing something just for the sake of change.

Completely agree.

i can't for the life of me remember a date now so i'd be feckled if we started changing things

Technically it isn't fine, as we date things from the birth of a historical figure that may or may not have existed, and certainly may not have been the son of God.

We should be trying to date things from both the beginning of the Universe and from when Humanity first evolved.

Agreed. Change for the sake of change is silly.


You can't really put a precise timeline on those things though. Just leave it as it is. Who gives a shit when we date things from?

If you can explain to us how to accurately date that, then we can go along with it.

As a subset to what you've all so elequently discussed above, I'd like to propose that we do tether something to what the Earth physically does. We know that at 10:44 today, 21 December, the Earth reaches the top-most extent of its tilt of approximately 23.5 degrees upwards from the Sun, when we visualise the Sun as being above the imaginary Tropic of Capricorn.

I suggest that we make this the end of the old year and the start of the new one - a true Earth related year. On 21 June when we see the Sun over the Tropic of Cancer, that will be our mid-summer day as at present. We then create our day, month and time structure around that. Essential as atomic time is for electronic devices, it is different from solar time; very rarely is the sun due south at 12:00 midday - so we could recognise the true solar mid-day AND the atomic mid-day for the benefit of the electronics.

I suggest that if we anchor year-end change to the winter solstice, then that may help us to choose which of the several good systems you've proposed above for rationalising the year into something relevant to our needs.

Have a great Christmas holiday thinking this one out ! All the best !

We count use a countdown from 1000 instead - just think of the blind panic in 999 years time

Archaeologists, physicists. cosmologists. etc.

What a bloody ridiculous idea.

Meanwhile the rest of us don't care one jot. Why change something when it works perfectly fine for the vast majority of the population?

Because it is based on a false hood.

It is not the year 2017 in terms of how long humans have existed.

I agree with another poster that the start of the year should be on the 21st of December.

Perhaps we should use a stardate like they do on Star Trek.

I love these threads where people imply they have a say in something when they don't .

It's Stardate 94574.86

It should have been Julius Caesar, not Jesus Christ, but a Roman scribe decided to have a bit of a giggle...

There is no such thng as time so it doesn't really matter what we want to apply.

How much would this cost and what would be the benefits?

They've already done that as at the end of it baby cheese's was born

If you're particularly worried about the Christian associations (I'm not, Anno Domini has a splendid ring to it) these were binned a number of decades ago. The generally accepted terminology nowadays is CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era).

You are I hope fully prepared for 0x7fffffff day? There's still a fair few systems out there that won't be ready is it because there's no fancy phrase like 'billennium bug'?



edit: found the problem, or one of them at least, signed versus unsigned makes the difference between 0x7fffffff and 0xffffffff, what's a few decades between friends it's still going to be Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038, the real question is whether it's immediately before or immediately after, and depends on the flight time of a swallow.

Much the same as decimal time, I like the idea of the holocene calendar but I'm not sure it's worth the aggro to impose it at this juncture.

Time is a falsehood as well, so your point it moot.