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Is there a scientific calendar which uses a different reference than Jesus? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world

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I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt's calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.

Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?

Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be "nice" because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.

Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?

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[–] stoneparchment@possumpat.io 53 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.

Take your pick: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars

I personally use "2024 CE" for "common era", with BCE referring to "before common era". This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE... A bit of a cop out, but

Anyway have fun, there are lots of options

Edit: also the one you're referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar

[–] stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Thank you for your answer and the links! You are right about the Holocene Calendar.

I also think it is unfortunate we did not figure out a better starting point. Therefore the question.

Edit: typo

[–] viking@infosec.pub 9 points 3 months ago

Thing is that at the time where people were looking for answers in the sky rather than in science, the birth of the messiah was the best possible starting point they could think of. And it took many centuries to get over it (with quite a few still being stuck in the past), so it's really hard to collectively move on to something better. And at this point I'm not even sure "better" wouldn't be anything but simply different for the sake of being different.

[–] laughterlaughter@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Many things us humans do are "unfortunate" because we don't know any better. 2000 years from know, humans might say that it was "unfortunate" that humans used fossil fuels, or wore high heels. Instead of regretting the past, be the change you want to be.