Erm, Guardian?

We used to distinguish carefully between a Republic and an Empire but the present state of the US suggests that it may be becoming a “distinction without a difference”.

@BinA: true. You could say it changed from a Republic that ran an empire to a Principate that ran an empire. But would Guardian readers recognise “Principate”?

Thank you jgh. At least you have used the proper term, AD.

Anon – But calling it BC/AD does more correctly place it as just one culturally specific system among many.

The point of BCE etc. isn’t to be inclusive, it’s to piss off Christians. There is no other purpose.

Kind of like when one of the Blokes (sorry I can’t remember which one) recently posted a link to a fat Scottish journalist, who said it would be an outrage and a scandal if a Christian woman was their First Minister, but it’s an honour and a privilege to be ruled by Muslims. (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly).

I fully expect Christianity to be made illegal in my lifetime, but we’ve been here before so whatevs.

@Steve

I’m sure scientists and the like enjoy feeling all superior for using a neutral, rational dating system… But if that’s what they want to do, they should have made one themselves rather than try de-Christianising a Christian one. That’s fooling nobody and, aside from insulting Christians, claiming the Western Christian calendar as the humanistic, universal one is an insult to everyone else to boot. In fact, since they already did make one up, maybe more of the modern ones should switch to their forebearers’ painstakingly secular French revolutionary calendar. Oh dear, is that too eurocentric as well? Quelle horreur.

In all seriousness, Yuri Gagarin’s Interesting Day Out would make a decent “neutral” Day Zero if you wanted to go down that route. But how many months would there be, how many days in a week even? Follow the lunar or solar calendar or a bit of both? What would you do about leap days, leap weeks or leap months? You can’t get away from the historic and cultural backdrop these decisions got made in.

If I remember my scifi correctly, Piper’s Terra-human universe uses pre and post atomic as the start date.

So perhaps a really scientific calendar would be pre and post Hiroshima??

@bb

I’d probably go for the Trinity test myself. From a technical point of view, that detonation was the bigger “first” – ultimately the biggest difference with Hiroshima was the context, i.e. someone else being on the other end of it. Seems a bit crass to pick Hiroshima given the death toll. That change shifts you back to 16 July, 1945 rather than 6 August.

But “atomic age” is a bit ambiguous. From a more peaceful angle, maybe Atomic Pile 1 in Chicago, 2 December 1942? First self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. There would be other candidates too. How about 21 December, 1951, first time nuclear power was used to generate electricity at the Experimental Breeder Reactor I, Idaho (powering a grand total of four light bulbs). Or 27 June, 1954, the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, Russia is the first to be connected to a power grid. Or 17 October, 1956, first full-scale nuclear power plant opened at Calder Hall, Cumbria. Or if you’re very fussy about the nature of your nuclear power plant, maybe 18 December, 1957, when the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania was connected to the grid. Calder Hall was intended to produce plutonium whereas Shippingport was the first full-scale station purpose-built for electricity generation.

Even the Space Age has a few candidates. First artificial satellite Sputnik-1 (4 October 1957), Vostok 1 puts first human in space (12 April 1961), Apollo 11 puts first man on the moon (July 20, 1969), first human steps on the lunar surface (July 21 if you’re working UTC), first human on another planet (TBA with NASA aiming for the 2030s), first permanent habitation on another world (the Chinese/Russian International Lunar Research Station is planned for 2035). But you probably want one of the earlier of those – be curious to define the Space Age as having started after humans have been whizzing round in space for so long – and you probably want it to involve a human. So Vostok 1 or Apollo 11 stand out for me.

As any fule kno

For us Unix types Time began on 1/1/1970

ps I still think that we should have kept Lady Day 25 March as New Year.

dearieme – Aren’t you a Roman Catholic rather than a Christian?

Splendid.

I’m no theodidact, I’m just not terribly convinced by the idea that Christians were doing Christianity wrong until the likes of John Knox showed up in 1514 (AD).

Anon – I’m sure scientists and the like enjoy feeling all superior for using a neutral, rational dating system […] maybe more of the modern ones should switch to their forebearers’ painstakingly secular French revolutionary calendar.

Remember, the French Revolutionaries tried to make “Reason” their state religion, but nobody would be foolish enough to call their blood-hungry society reasonable.

See also the modern cult of “the Science”.

Apollo 11 puts first man on the moon (July 20, 1969),

In retrospect, that was the high water mark for the United States, and perhaps Western civilisation as a whole.

NASA claims to be planning on returning to the Moon. A cheeky fiver says they’ve lost the ability to do so, and won’t get it back. Unless they’ve got some Nazi rocket scientists in the same freezer Walt Disney uses.

@Steve

On that note, but after the revolutionary era, there’s also the “positivist calendar” of Comte (whose positivist “religion of humanity” found some favour with Brazilian and Mexican revolutionaries too – “Ordem e Progresso” coming directly from Comte). According to wiki, “a solar calendar with 13 months of 28 days, and an additional festival day commemorating the dead, totalling 365 days.” Those months being an eccentric but eurocentric mix:
Moses
Homer
Aristotle
Archimedes
Caesar
Saint Paul
Charlemagne
Dante
Gutenberg
Shakespeare
Descartes
Frederick
Bichat

Like the French Republican calendar, 1789 became Year 1.

September 12 1933, apparently.

How about Unix day 0, January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)?

Anon – Those months being an eccentric but eurocentric mix:

Yarp, but then, Western Man rather puts the world to shame, doesn’t he? Our civilisation is/was the greatest this little rock circling an unprepossessing G-class star has ever seen since the first caveman drew boobs. Produced a cosmic explosion of geniuses in the arts, philosophy, music, literature, architecture, science, technology, and so on. A few uncouth tribes from a tiny, backwater, fringe continent literally and literary changed the lives of people everywhere on this planet. We found people living in grass huts, and brought them into the jet era.

In cruel comparison, the achievements and discoveries made by blokes in the Orient and Araby are that card where the Monopoly Man has his empty pockets turned inside out, an exclamation of embarrassment on his poor bewhiskered face.

I am astoundified that Westerners were stupid enough to fall for the KGB narrative that our ancestors conquering the world is something we should be ashamed of.

BTW, in Mongolia they are so not-ashamed of genocidal imperialist warlord (and friend of Bill and Ted) Genghis Khan, they built a massive golden fuck-off statue to him.

Meanwhile, Winston Churchill’s statue is not safe from vandalism in London.

Things that make u go hmm.

Tim – you reminded me of the greatest joke ever told about religion:

“Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.”
– Emo Phillips

(It’s funny cos it’s true)

PS – weird calendar ideas. Why not 30 April 1993?

CERN made the World Wide Web freely available. I think we’re maybe too close to see it fully, but the internet is already proving to be a far more socially consequential technology than even Gutenberg’s word wanger.

And the Roman Catholic church which came out of the reformation wasn’t the same church that had gone into it. All those questions that Martin & John asked needed answers which the church hadn’t nailed down before 1517.

Even if the answers were “burn the chubby German”.

A ‘Scientific’ calendar would be a continuous monotonic sequence, i.e. it would have a zero point and thus a year zero, unlike BC/AD. Where the zero should be I haven’t a scooby. Some astronomical conjunction of dissimilar period scales might work, as in calendars like the Mayan. However we decoupled the time scale from astronomical events when we adopted the SI definition of the second as tied to the behaviour of electrons in the Caesium atom.

Of course this is all pretentious pendantry as no-one is going to change the one now commonly used globally except for arcane disputes about leap seconds, and perhaps a redefinition of the second in terms of much more accurate atomic/nuclear clocks in the future.