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Is there a scientific calendar which uses a different reference than Jesus? (self.science)

submitted 3 months ago by stardustpathsofglory to c/science

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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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[–] SpaceNoodle 119 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Unix time. Zero is midnight UTC on 1 January 1970.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Technically the choice of 1st January 1970 is itself a reference to the gregorian calendar

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's not a reference to anything, it's just a moment in time.

[–] laughterlaughter 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I agree with you, but I'm still curious.

How do we handle dates before epoch 0?

Edit: I guess we'll use negative numbers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

More importantly, how will we handle dates further than 19 January 2038 with Unix time?

[–] BarbecueCowboy 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

We'll just make a new Unix time on 19 January 2038.

Unix Time 2: 2 Fast, 2 Furious.

[–] toynbee 1 points 3 months ago

With blackjack and hookers.

[–] laughterlaughter 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

128 bits?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

64 bit counters are enough

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Depends what you count. Seconds? Milliseconds? Nanoseconds?

[–] SpaceNoodle 3 points 3 months ago

I was using that as a common reference to something with which we're already familiar.

[–] m3t00 1 points 3 months ago

often use it as my birthday to crash poorly written scripts. zeros are fun to inject