The interesting thing about adopting a humanist outlook on life is the way you start to look at things differently. Things that you just used to accept as that’s just the way it is suddenly seem to not make much sense anymore.
One of those things that has “bothered” me for the last few years has been the basis of our calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world. It is based on the believed date of the nativity from the New Testament of the Christian Bible.
For years I have thought that our calendar is kind of annoying. Once you get down to year 1, you jump to year –1 and start counting in reverse. I’ve never liked how we start counting backward, dates just don’t seem right getting “bigger” as you go back in time. It’s one of those things that doesn’t keep you up at night, but you know that it is just a ridiculous system, at least when documenting human history.
I’ve thought for a while that we should pick a date sufficiently far back in the past so that it encompasses all of written human history and move forward from that as a year zero. To me it has always made sense to make it an even multiple of 10,000 so as to be able to keep our current numbering system during a transition period. As it turns out, 10,000 years is just about right, you don’t have to go back further.
So with this in mind, I did a search on the internet last night, figuring that if I had had the idea, chances are someone before had too. The gentleman to the right is Cesare Emiliani, an Italian-American geologist and palaeontologist, who later in life in 1993 proposed just such a system.
He saw four problems with the current calendar: (from Wikipedia)
- The Anno Domini era is based on an erroneous estimation of the birth year of Jesus Christ. The era places Jesus’ birth year in 1 BC, but modern scholars have determined that he was born in or before 4 BC. Emiliani argues that replacing it with the approximate beginning of the Holocene era makes sense.
- Emiliani opined that the birth of Jesus Christ is a less universally relevant epoch event than the approximate beginning of the Holocene era.
- The years BC are counted down when moving from past to future, making calculation of timespans difficult.
- The Anno Domini era has no year zero, with 1 BC followed immediately by AD 1, complicating the calculation of timespans further.
His solution was the proposal of the Holocene Calendar, or Human Era (HE) calendar which starts at roughly the beginning of the Holocene Epoch. Holocene is Greek meaning entirely recent. It turns out that 10,000 years is right about the time that the Holocene started.
To me the adoption of such a calendar makes sense. It requires very little adjustment to current systems other than sticking a one in front of the current date. I’ve heard people claim that it would cause a future computer problem, however, I personally would be very surprised if computers 8000 years from now were using current code anyway.
Today for example would be April 5, 12014. We could still consider 2014 to be shorthand, but in scientific and historical studies the HE date would be used. Here are common dates from history.
In my opinion such a calendar should be considered our standard calendar, moving us away from a calendar based on an event that is not historically significant to a large part of the human population. It puts most significant human events on one timeline, and for those adverse to change, it affects day to day current calendars very little if at all. I know that in school such a calendar would have made much more sense when studying written human history.
