Starting a new calendar - when do we count from?

One day while browsing the Dope you hear a rap at the door. Opening it, you see an ethereal light and heavenly chorus. From it steps a swarthy bearded figure, who according to his business card is Sir Jesus H. Christ, Esq.

Inviting himself in, he explains that the heavenly seraphim and cherubim have been taking the piss out him as Dionysius Exiguus naming an entire epoch or two after him runs rather counter to the whole Christian humility thing. In his infinite wisdom he has picked you to choose the calendar. Don’t worry about humanity not adopting it - his dad will make sure people listen to you.

You aren’t allowed to just copy the calendar of another culture, as J.C. hates laziness - that’s why he didn’t get his mates to lash him to a cross rather than going through all that effort. He’d prefer that you get get rid of all those pagan references in the months and days, but you don’t have to. All the celestial bodies still take the same amount of time to traverse their course - you can’t ask that the Earth speed up or slow down in its orbit or rotation as that would mess up God’s desktop background.

Would have had a poll but there are so many options it’d be ridiculous. Ad urbe condita? Norman conquest? That time you found a buck on the street?

I’ve actually thought about what a modern, scientifically based calendar might be.

Still, a lot of ways you could go, but since the 24-hour day is based on one earth rotation, I think it still makes sense to keep the calendar year based on one earth orbit around the sun.

I say break it down to 10 months. The first 9 has 37 days even. The last month would be the leap month, so would usually have 32 days, and on the 4th year would have 33.

The Calendar would kick off at year 0 MD (modern day), on the first dawn of the winter solstice.
ETA: Or, you could go 9 months with 36 days, and the last having 41/42 days where you could cram that last week as a “winder holiday” where it’s common practice to take off work, and celebrate the new year.

December 23, 1968, when the first humans left the Earth behind and entered the gravitational sphere of influence of another celestial body. Apollo 11 was awesome, but Apollo 8 has always been the real breakthrough in my book.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_08a_Summary.htm

err… “winter holiday”

I see I’ve misunderstood the OP.

I like the idea of Apollo 8 (or 11). I’m wondering if there’s a world event that is washed from the influence of a government institution that could stand in its place.

I don’t think you have. We were simply addressing different aspects of it.

Well with that kind of authority backing me, the first thing I would do would be to cancel the slavish insistence that every week consist of 7 days. Then I would decree 13 months (named after famous artists or writers) of 28 named days (after famous scientists) each and starting on the day of the vernal equinox (at the date line, that being the most natural place to do it) and, for the last month only, one or two unnamed days devoted to pure hedonism. Every month would start on the same day (Archimedes, Arch for short). Imagine how it would simplify life. “I was born on Newton, the 23rd day of Picasso.”

Any sensible calendar should involve reasonable divisions of the year into equal(ish) sized sections, and should have those sections each have a whole number of days. The year is about 365.25 days long, which is conveniently close to a number that has lots of prime factors: 360 (222335). So the year should probably be based on a nominal 360 day cycle (we’ll handle the extra 5.25 days further down), which could be divided into 12 30-day months, or 6 60-day ones, or 10 36 day ones. Since we often divide the year (approximately) into 4 seasons, it makes sense that the number of months be a multiple of 4, so that leaves us with 490-days, 845-days, 1230-days, 2018 days, 2415 days as options. Or, we could decide that the seasons thing isn’t very helpful, and ignore that restriction, which opens up a few more options, like 10*36.

Now, let’s return to the extra 5.25 days. Ideally, our number of months would be a multiple of either 5 or 6 so we could tack an extra day on to each nth month. For this reason, 10 months of 36 days works out really nicely. Every other month gets an extra day, and the last month also gets an extra day on leap years.

The nominal 36-day month breaks up nicely into 6 6-day weeks, and I think you have the extra days exist outside of the standard week cycle, which makes weeks all align on month and year boundaries.

This is similar to cmyk’s suggestion, but I think putting all the extra days on one month is worse than spreading them out. On the other hand, if you’re on a 6-week cycle and you put the extra days all at the end, then there are 61 weeks in a year, but most of the time the last week is only 5-days long. But it makes the “month” as a division of time less useful.

You start the year on the winter solstice.

I would start the new calendar in the year 1206. This was the year that the great Kurultai pronounced Temujin to be Genghis Khan, leader of all the Mongols, and is seen by many to be the beginning of the Mongol Empire. The effects of the Mongol rule are around everywhere. Just to pick one example not at random, the Black Death is arguably a consequence of the Mongol conquests in China. Directly, and indirectly the Mongols reshaped the world, even in those areas where they did not come as conquerors.

Nations and political alliances (and rivalries) exist today because of the effects of the Mongols.

So year one of the new calendar will be the year of the great Kurultai. That makes this year 805.

I would set the beginning of the year as the Vernal Equinox, with all the hope and growth that spring brings. (Sorry Southern Hemisphere, you’re outnumbered by the population in the Northern Hemisphere.)

There is no benefit, in my mind, to trying to regularize the year as anything other than an orbit of the Earth about the sun. So, we’re still stuck with 365.23 days per year. No matter how cumbersome that may get. I would keep the seven day week, but go to a ten month calendar: five months of 36 days, and five months of 37 days, with the even numbered months having the extra day.

While naming the days and months after scientists and artists has a certain appeal, I’d much prefer to avoid it. Tycho Brahe, and his crater, should be an obvious example of why I think that’s something that is likely to end up leaving generations of students asking, “Why in the hell is that named after this person?”

For the months, then, I’d suggest naming each one after a different plant, or flower. In order: Anemone; Orchid; Tulip; Dahlia; Chrysanthemum; Lily; Sunflower; Amaryllis; Pansy; and Phlox. The days of the week would be named after a different grain: Maizeday, Milletday, Riceday, Oatday, Barleyday, Wheatday, and Sorghamday. Leap Day will be added to Sunflower on the years it is called for.

Thus, today’s date would be: Sorghamday, the twentieth day of Lily, in the 805th year of the Great Khan.

Nope, you have absolute carte blanche to reshape the calendar as you see fit.

I would start from January 27, 1756. This means that we are currently in 256 AA (Anno Amadeus)

There would be 13 months of 28 days (364 days).

The new month would be called “Mozart”. There is an extra day at the end of the year called “Wolfie”. In leap years there is a second extra day call “Constanze”.

Sweet!

And since me and apparently iamthewalrus(:3= are pretty much on the same page, I’d like to keep the “month” names in line with our friendly neighborhood heavenly bodies:

  1. Mercuary

  2. Venusia.

  3. Earthtember.

  4. Marstober.

  5. Juno.

  6. Saturnuary.

  7. Neptunary.

  8. Plutonium. Hrmm…

  9. Luna.

and, uh…

  1. Solbruary?

Um… yeah, I’m working on it…

Right away we have a problem. Earth’s rotation is slowing down, obligating a leap second now and then.

I guess it’s just the heretic in me, but I say leave well enough alone. No new uniform system will fit with the irregularities of the solar system, but at least we have one now that fits well enough for a long time to come.

Er…slow it down any more.

Say what?

You can’t slow down the Earth’s rotation any more, is what I meant - even if it is already slowing.

First, some preliminaries that some others have mentioned: I would keep the basic system, since it seems to work fairly well, and there are very few calendars that don’t follow them. So, we will need days, weeks, months, and years.

Going from biggest to smallest:

The epoch or year 0, and there is an explicit year 0 in this calendar, is the first day of the year 4713 BC. This is the beginning of the Julian date system, which is convenient since it precedes almost all human history. That would make this year 6723. (I like this concept, but I am not married to this particular epoch. Other good ones will help.)

As for getting the calendar to stay in synch with the seasons, you have three options. Leap days, leap weeks, and leap months. A month seems too long, and would make scheduling recurring annual things, like school calendars and the like a real pain. Weeks would be okay, but they allow a rather wide variation from the solstices and the equinoxes. So, days it is. The leap day would be on the last day of the year, since that is the easiest place to put it. There are a number of ways of determining where to put the leap days. I would put the anchor point of the calendar at the vernal equinox of the northern hemisphere. It just so happens that that point is the most stable (although it won’t necessarily always be) of the bunch. Conveniently, this means we can riff off the Gregorian calendar which also uses the vernal equinox as its anchor. As for leap years, the Gregorian calendar has a somewhat suboptimal system, but one that is fairly easy to remember. The other way is to have 8 leap years every 33 years. (What you do is divide the year number by 33, and if you get a remainder that is divisible by 4, except for remainders of 0, that year is a leap year.) I kind of like this system, so I will go with it. But instead of having the anchor point of the calendar, the vernal equinox, fall on March 21, as it does now, I would have the vernal equinox be close to the beginning of the year.

There are calendars with thirteen months, but it seems that commerce prefers that the year can be broken down into quarters. Now, while this sort of division has arguably led to shortsighted decision making, let’s go with it. So we need either 8 or 12 or 16 months. 12 is probably the best since it divides 3 and 4, but just to be different, let’s go with 16. This gives us a smidge less than 23 days a month. I would partition the days integrally into months as evenly as possible. This means that months 1–7 would have 23 days, month 8 would get 22, months 9–15 get 23, and month 16 gets 21 (or 22 in leap years).

I would divide the year into weeks of 8 days. This either leads to a cyclical pattern, where every year has each day of each month change the day of the week it falls on (the situation now), or you could decree that the week starts over each year. I know that many calendar reforms try to have the same date on the same day of the week each year, but I’m not sure that’s all that great a feature. Some people’s birthdays would never be on the weekend for example. And (and this really gets me since it happened a lot although not every year) some people’s birthday would always be the first day of school. Is this enough to justify avoidance of the interruption of the cycle of days of the week? Perhaps. Probably not. But I will do it anyway.

As for days, I would keep the 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds, since attempts to change this (at least in the West) have not gone well at all. But I would disassociate the second that determines things in the metric system from the second that governs clocks. The clock second would be increased to avoid or minimize the leap seconds that get added from time to time. I imagine a situation where the clock second is redefined every 50 years to keep clocks in synch with the rotation of the earth. Doing this, however, may prove to be a pain in the ass in practice. Days begin at midnight, and end the instant before.

Past that, we need names for stuff. Each language can do whatever it wants, but I would suggest we keep things roughly the same, looking through history to fill in the gaps. For example, there used to be months named Quintilis and Sextilis (perhaps anglicized to some degree), so we could run with that. Perhaps we could borrow from other calendars as well, such as the first months of the Hebrew calendar (Nisan) and the Islamic calendar (Muharram). To keep January from falling in the spring, let’s do a bit of a shift, and start the year in April: We might get a list of months that looks like this: April, May, Nisan, June, July, August, Sextilis, September, October, Muharram, November, December, January, Quintilis, February, and March.

As for the days of the week, they are currently based on the planets as they were once defined. We could either go with that same idea with the current definition of the planets (giving Mercuryday, Venusday, Earthday, and so on), or we could just add Uranus or perhaps avoid the jokes that go along with that and use Neptune. I would go with Neptune, and I would stick Nepday after Wednesday. This gives the days of the week as: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Nepday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I will use the system where the week begins on Sunday.

I have no idea what all this makes today’s date. The math is really, really, error prone, and I just gave up.

The new calendar starts tomorrow. Each year is made up of one month with one day in it. That day is called “Today”. The month is called “Sometime”. So tomorrow will be “Sometime Today 1”. This coming Christmas will be on “Sometime Today 65” (Did I mention that the year will be expressed in base-14?)

After thinking about it some more, another reasonable option would be to have 1230-day months, split into 65-day weeks or 5*6-day weeks each, with one extra week at the end. The nice thing about 5-day weeks is that it makes the year have a whole number of weeks most years. The nice thing about 6-day weeks is that 6 has more factors than 5 does, so it’s easier to split the week up evenly. Which you choose depends on whether you really want the month or the week to be the more fundamental grouping of days.

One potential objection to naming the months after the planets: That contradicts the injunction to avoid allusions to pagan worship. Obviously it’s not a hard and fast requirement, but when J.C. asks for something you know where you should be thinking…

Now I like that one!

H. Beam Piper, the science fiction author, wrote a Future History in which the calendar started sometime in1943, on the date the atom was first split.