6 ms·

What about years without the Earth?

• lostlogin 12y ago
  When I think about this it gets progressively more amusing. Year 2014 is a time point when Jesus was between 4 and 6. That level of imprecision contrasts starkly with the time stamps being discussed. That Jesus even comes into it is fascinating. Maybe 2014 CE is less controversial, although somewhat dishonest as it uses the same time point as reference. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus#Date_of_birth http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus#Date_of_bir...
  • PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    Eh, I think at this point the provenance and significance of the zero date is less important than just having a zero, any zero, that everyone can agree upon and that matches up with the standard used more-or-less globally for the last century at least. I don't think there's anything dishonest about CE using the same reference point as AD; it's just the most convenient one.
  • kijin 12y ago
    The beginning of the Holocene around 11700 BP might serve as a good objective reference point. Nearly every interesting thing that happened in the history of human civilization took place in the Holocene. No more negative years to worry about! "Present" in "before present" (BP) usually means 1950 AD [1], so this year would be Year 11764 of the Holocene epoch. Brb, gotta find some COBOL programmers to fix that Y10K problem. But then, the starting date of 11700 BP is also kinda arbitrary. No single short-term event defines the boundary between Pleistocene and Holocene, so we're still left with a sizable margin of error, probably even larger than the error in Jesus' date of birth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present