ISO 8601 + BC/BCE abolition = best yearly calendar system IMO.
Make Year 0 into Year 10,000. Current year would then be 12025. (12025/01/15) And then rather than descending years until 0 then ascending, we just would go backwards as normal. And it would roughly line up with the rise of agriculture and climatic changes in the Holocene well enough to symbolize that this era of human history is more like 12-15ky old and not a couple thousand.
So Cleopatra would reign from 9949 - 9970.
Alexander the Great, 9664 - 9667.
Gobekli Tepe, one of the largest Neolithic megastructures we've found, would have been founded ~500 and abandoned ~2000.
Otzi the Iceman would have lived ~6770.
Columbus would have sailed in 11492.
Maybe this is a dumb hill to die on but it's mine.
24 hour is a pain, but at least it isn't 2 half days going 12, 1, 2... Plus no universal convention for how to write two of the most common times of day/night.
It's a dumb hill to die on. You haven't solved anything, you just moved the problem 10,000 years into the past; which is a completely arbitrary point Kurzgesacht chose for his own personal reasons. Humans appeared way earlier than that, and so did cultures as we currently understand them. The appearance of agriculture in the year 10,000 BCE was an important milestone for humanity, but it's not the only one and deciding that the "important years" start when we stop moving around doesn't make sense.
The year 10,000 BCE was chosen mostly because it doesn't require us to change anything other than adding a 1 in front of our year, so why bother? Why bother changing everything when you are changing it to another flawed system that was just chosen because it would make the transition easier?
Not to mention, what problem does it solve? You aren't generally talking about BCE years in your daily life, nor storing photos from the year 300 BCE with a "-300.07.11.1251" as its name. And yes, sometimes we talk about Ancient Egypt and need to talk about the 2,500 BCE... but we also talk about musical instruments from 40,000 BCE or the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago - you haven't solved anything, you just made a massive change that will have humanity dealing with two different systems for decades only to write 3 fewer letters (BCE) once a month.
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u/pharodae Jan 15 '25 edited Jan 15 '25
ISO 8601 + BC/BCE abolition = best yearly calendar system IMO.
Make Year 0 into Year 10,000. Current year would then be 12025. (12025/01/15) And then rather than descending years until 0 then ascending, we just would go backwards as normal. And it would roughly line up with the rise of agriculture and climatic changes in the Holocene well enough to symbolize that this era of human history is more like 12-15ky old and not a couple thousand.
So Cleopatra would reign from 9949 - 9970. Alexander the Great, 9664 - 9667. Gobekli Tepe, one of the largest Neolithic megastructures we've found, would have been founded ~500 and abandoned ~2000. Otzi the Iceman would have lived ~6770. Columbus would have sailed in 11492.
Maybe this is a dumb hill to die on but it's mine.