Many different cultures have differing years which we are now in.
I think the Jews have it at 5761 right now, etc.
Who is closest, and why so many variances?
Closest to what? The beginning of time? The creation of our planet? Cultures started keeping track of years at different times in history, so no one is right or wrong. We started keeping track 2002 years ago, the Jews started keeping track 5761 years ago. The only problem that occurs is when a culture does not measure a year as the exact right length it should be (one revolution around the sun). That’s why we have strategically placed leap year days.
They all have different starting points they count from.
Not all religions belleve that Christ was (is?) God. We generally say this is 2002 AD (anno dominio - the year of the lord). The Jews, when they use the general calendar say it is 2002 CE (in the common/Christian era - and refer to BC as BCE - before the common/Christian era). Their calendar started over 5000 years ago and saw no need for a new calendar because of Christ.
So, likewise, the different religions have started their calendars before Christ and have seen no need to change theirs.
Our calendar has changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar and different countries have adopted the latter calendar at different times. But that’s another topic.
It would depend on how ‘old’ the culture is.
Different cultures, different starting dates.
If its a countdown to the end, the the Mayans have set the date 2012 give or take a year.
It’s year 33 in the Kamandi calendar.
Wasn’t the “end” supposed to be July 5, 1998?
Welcome to the SDMB, lemon yellow. Despite the joking around, we try to run a tight ship in General Questions. The first response in this thread asked you what you meant in the above quote. I admit to being curious myself. It’s considered good form here to provide clarification to a post when asked.
I think that you will enjoy Robert Anton Wilson’s essay How To Live Eleven Days In Twenty-four Hours.
Both humourous and factual, and written entirely in E-Prime. I think it’s relatively cool.
The Calendar Converter - Fourmilab’s Javascript tool to convert from and to nearly every calendar used by humans, including things like the Unix time() syscall (seconds since the epoch, 1 January 1970 0000 GMT) and the Excel serial day numbers (both Microsoft and Macintosh).
If you ever need to convert from the Indian Civil Calendar to the Ancient Mayan Calendar, this is your tool. 
Just to be precise, this year is 5762 in the Jewish calendar, and we’re just a month and a day away from New Year 5763.
Another cool link in addition to Derleth’s way cool one is:
http://www.ecben.net/calendar.shtml
It gives you today’s date in a number of systems.
First, thank you for the links, and the welcome.
What i meant was-closest to the beginning of humans; when we first appeared on earth and could think of counting years.
Does this mean that the culture with the highest number in their year has been around the longest?
Not necessarily. Folks didn’t actually start using the AD system 2002 years ago… They started using it several centuries later. A culture might have reasons to use a “start” date considerably earlier than their civilization was actually around. Modern astronomers, for instance, use something called the “Julian Day”, which has its zero point over six thousand years ago. On the other end of the scale, some cultures reset every so often. It used to be rather common to start counting anew with every new monarch. A thousand-year old nation might just be in the third year of the reign of King Bob the Twelfth.
As for the beginning of humans, by most accounts that was over a million years ago, and there’s no currently-used date system that even comes close to that. Whoever has the highest number is the closest, but not by very much.
Not neccesarily. Take a look at Joseph Scaliger’s “Julian days” system. He uses an epoch date of 4713 BC on the Julian calendar in order to start from a point where three well known calendrical cycles coincided, and to provide a starting point prior to all known historical calendrical dates. His aim was to provide a unified system for describing historical dates, which would also not have a negative. Today is Julian day 2452494.
(Joseph Scaliger was probably the first guy to come up with a rational scheme for encoding dates and recognizing that representation on a particular calendar was a matter of formatting, though in the 16th century he would not have used those terms.)
I could imagine many cultures coming up with calendrical systems which they “back dated” to some starting point before their culture existed. For that matter, the idea of counting years since the (possibly erroniously calculated) birth of Christ did not start until centuries after the time of Christ.
Not all cultures commonly counted years continously from some fixed point, either. What historical records we have are likely to take the form of “In the fifth year of the reign of King Whatzizface” rather than a readily identifiable year.
Dang it, Chronos. Simulposts, OK, but multi-point-simulposts?