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Our dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar

Our dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar has also seen a major revision in October 1582. Long before and after that religion became dominant, many people have used different calendar systems - and many still do. Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and the Western Roman Empire fell around 476 CE. That's over 1200 years. It's more likely that another "year zero" event will happen in less than 8000 years. If the history survives that, we will probably just call the current era "Gregorian" or so.

skissane 1y ago
It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH). But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed. Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard. I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.
- dmurray 1y ago
  > But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
  - kragen 1y ago
    What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.
    - dmurray 1y ago
      It's an offshoot of the Gregorian calendar, being offset from it by a whole number of years. And Thompson and Ritchie grew up and worked in a majority-Christian country: their individual faith doesn't have much to do with it.
      - skissane 1y ago
        The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway

skissane 1y ago

It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH). But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed. Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard. I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.

dmurray 1y ago
> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.
- kragen 1y ago
  What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.
  - dmurray 1y ago
    It's an offshoot of the Gregorian calendar, being offset from it by a whole number of years. And Thompson and Ritchie grew up and worked in a majority-Christian country: their individual faith doesn't have much to do with it.
    - skissane 1y ago
      The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway