What year should it be?

[Surlethe]

I'm going to jump on the "who gives a shit?" bandwagon. The only real quantity of interest when it comes to time is time elapsed -- i.e., the temporal interval between two events. So the only reason why we have any sort of absolute timescale at all is to make calculations easy.

In fact, here's an idea: make the current year 0 and count backwards. That way the "years ago" all become actual dates.

[Junghalli]

In fact, here's an idea: make the current year 0 and count backwards. That way the "years ago" all become actual dates.

The problem with that is it's going to make things really awkward for history textbooks and the like. All the dates of past events are going to have to be changed each year. Having a fixed year 0 creates much less headaches.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The farthest I go with this whole clusterfuck is to sometimes refer to the year 0 as the year Darwin was born, but only if I am being formal in a tongue in cheek sort of way.

The simple fact is, a huge part of our culture and heritage come from silly, backward religious beliefs, and I have no problem having something as arbitrary as the year 0 on the calendar making reference to the most pivotal figure (for good or ill, real or not, even) in human history.

[Kanastrous]

In one of my fictional timelines (a spaceborne society) the characters use the year 1961 CE as their year 1 - being Spacers, they mark time from Yuri Gagarin's space flight.

[Sky Captain]

In Discovery movie Supervolcano they stated that if Yellowstone went boom we would refer to Before Yellowstone and After Yellowstone.

[Posner]

Well, there's the tranquility calendar, which counts the day of the first moon landing as time zero. So we're currently living in 39 A.T (after tranquility) The Apollo astronauts landed in the sea of tranquility.

The tranquility calendar has 13 months of 28 days, divided into four weeks. Because 28 is a multiple of 7, each month begins of a monday and ends on a friday. So you can predict the day of the week for any given calendar date. the 365th day of the year isn't part of any month, and has no day of the week. It is called Armstrong day. Every leapyear, there is an extra day called Aldrin Day.

link

The tranquility calendar is also used in the Orions Arm SF universe.

It is definitely not worth changing the calendar, there is too much path dependance. But damn, if I had to pick a different calendar- it would be this one, hands down.

[Adrian Laguna]

As a general nitpick, since some have mentioned it, there is no year zero. We count the year we are on not how many have elapsed. Zero can only be appropriately used for the instantaneous moment between 1 BC and AD 1. That is why the arrival of the new millennium should have been celebrated at the end of the year 2000, not the end of 1999. Most people don't realize this because we count years for all other purposes based on how many have elapsed.

The Imperial Calendar from WH40k is interesting in that it counts the years based on how many have elapsed as part of the millenium we are on. AD 1 would be the first year of the first millenium, which in the Imperial Calendar is 000.M1; thus AD 2008 becomes 007.M3. For further fun, it has no months, but rather counts up all the days. I don't know if they do it in terms of how many have elapsed or ordinarily. So today's date is either 336.007.M3 or 337.007.M3.

Anyway, relating to the OP. If I gave a damn enough to set a secular year one, it would be the current 27 BC or AD 14, those years represent the start and end of IMPERATOR·CAESAR·DIVI·FILIVS·AVGVSTVS' reign.

[PeZook]

I find it funny that Samuel thinks the Gregorian calendar was somehow "forced" on everybody, rather than just being convenient, unified, consistent and reliable, thus easing trade, communication, record keeping, administration etc.

Really, the Julian calendar needed tweaking, since it accumulated errors pretty quickly over time, so ol' Greg's reform is one of the things the Church actually did right. Why the fuck should we pick a different, arbitrary calendar?

And calling different arbitrary starting points "logical" or "illogical" is retarded and proves the thread's author doesn't actually know what logic is.