About our Calendars
Time is certainly quite fundamental to our lives. We know what time is looking at the brightness in the sky. But for counting weeks or months or years, our direct senses don't seem to be able to catch up. So we need a tool to keep in sync with where we are in space. As you probably know, an year is when we've circled the Sun once. A month is about when the Moon circles us once, while a day is when we go around ourselves once. So a calendar is more than a tool of collaboration. It's a tool of navigation, not only temporally but also physically.
In the post "An Year Every Month" I mentioned how we tend to associate time with the tools we use to measure it, and often forget the physical equivalence of it. Another part is the context of it all. Because we operate within the context time anyway, being cognizant of the whole of it adds to the story of our lives. If today's date was 7th Feb 202,026, it might've been less convenient than 7th Feb, 2026 is, but it would add a lot of story. "What happened in those 200,000 years?" a kid may find himself asking. The year is very much like a last name. How our last names have roots from generations in the past, the current year also points to similar roots of our collective past.
If you ask a random human from anywhere when humans likely showed up on the planet, when fire was likely discovered, when civilization as we know it likely began, etc. Said human might not be able to be precise. Yet if he looks at the calendar, he will definitely know when Jesus was born. Although even that we got wrong by a couple years. The choice is not between what religion or group's opinion to follow, but to figure out what calendar would be the most helpful for all of us.
Out of all the alternatives proposed or semi-implemented, I like the one recommended by Cesare Emiliani in 1993 the most. He proposed Year 1 could be roughly the year when human civilization began. That roughly needs us to add 10K years to the current system. So 2026 would be 12026. I for one would be really proud of humans if I find our choice of the origin of it all being consciously thought out. I can imagine children from school being really drawn in by the number 12026 much more than if 10K numbers were missing from it.
A good part of all of the messes in the world root from people not paying attention to our collective history, all that we've been through so far. Just like we didn't decide our own birth, nor did our parents. This lineage was decided by no human. And it's worth paying respect to the same by being aware of our journey. Calendar, a tool we use every day, can be a brilliant solution for this. Of course there are arguments against it. That it is too difficult, almost impossible to fix. Well, I agree. But maybe we'll find it easy once we realize it is important enough. If not for our daily meetings and collaborations, for the sake of the story we offer to all the generations to come.
I think it will be a worthy global project.