4 ms·

A bit of a thought experiment: Do we really need years? In the past a calendar based on how long it took to make an orbit around the sun was useful for agricult

A bit of a thought experiment: Do we really need years? In the past a calendar based on how long it took to make an orbit around the sun was useful for agricultural and other planning. Now we could have a 500 day cycle if we wanted to for some reason. Or maybe a hundred day cycle. Our ability to plant crops wouldn't be effected. There are many more variables involved now in determining when to plant or harvest than the Earth sitting at roughly the same spot as the last planting or harvest time. The Islamic calendar has long be out of sync with the solar calendar but still holds importance in Islamic culture. I'm sure there are others that likewise don't strictly abide by the solar year. Instead of having a celebration on the day that the Earth is roughly in the same place in its orbit around the sun as it was when you were born, why not celebrate in increments of thousands of days you've been alive? Maybe broken down into once every hundred day celebrations before hitting the 5000 day celebration so children will experience them more often? I understand that some countries have a "Name Day" for the different common names in their culture, which is a celebration on par as one's birthday. We are very use to anchoring things to the orbital position on the Earth relative to the sun but we no longer live in a time where such things are of primary importance. And don't even get me started on the possibilities of alternates to the primary school system being divided up into thirteen grades. Could each six week grading period (or a grading period of some other length) be its own grade? Do we really need to have so much of our culture and society tied so closely to the agricultural needs of the past?

chrismcb 8y ago
Actually I think we do need years. It is kind of nice to know that the snowy season is typically dec-feb. That the warm summer months are July and August. And so on. Without having to do some mental arithmetic
- ada1981 8y ago
  Yes I think this is true. I’m curious how future humans will relate. You could imagine an intergalactic mission in which the calendar was kept as a keepsake from earth. And if a new planet is colonized, would we work to stay in sync with earth in some way? Keep the same basic names but morph them? What happens when two different civilizations meet with different calendars (we have some historical data on that).
  - ZenPsycho 8y ago
    if you’re talking intergalactic, you have relativistic time shearing effects to deal with as well.
- true_religion 8y ago
  You could do that without explicit years if you had a base 12 system.
jcranmer 8y ago
The Mesoamerican long count calendar (which I'll call the Mayan calendar for short) counts days in a nearly-base-20 system. The nearly is because the second digit only counts up to 18 instead of 20, which means the nominally-400s-digit is actually counting near-years of 360 days. No intercalation was done to account for the year's length, and it's not because the Mesoamericans were dumb. The short count calendar was 18 months of 20 days with an extra 5 intercalated days (called Wayeb' in Yucatec Mayan), and there's no evidence for any kind of leap year correction, although the Mayans certainly did know that the year was around 365.25 days.

chrismcb 8y ago

Actually I think we do need years. It is kind of nice to know that the snowy season is typically dec-feb. That the warm summer months are July and August. And so on. Without having to do some mental arithmetic

ada1981 8y ago
Yes I think this is true. I’m curious how future humans will relate. You could imagine an intergalactic mission in which the calendar was kept as a keepsake from earth. And if a new planet is colonized, would we work to stay in sync with earth in some way? Keep the same basic names but morph them? What happens when two different civilizations meet with different calendars (we have some historical data on that).
- ZenPsycho 8y ago
  if you’re talking intergalactic, you have relativistic time shearing effects to deal with as well.
true_religion 8y ago
You could do that without explicit years if you had a base 12 system.

jcranmer 8y ago

The Mesoamerican long count calendar (which I'll call the Mayan calendar for short) counts days in a nearly-base-20 system. The nearly is because the second digit only counts up to 18 instead of 20, which means the nominally-400s-digit is actually counting near-years of 360 days. No intercalation was done to account for the year's length, and it's not because the Mesoamericans were dumb. The short count calendar was 18 months of 20 days with an extra 5 intercalated days (called Wayeb' in Yucatec Mayan), and there's no evidence for any kind of leap year correction, although the Mayans certainly did know that the year was around 365.25 days.