We all know the Gregorian calendar, right? It’s the “standard” one, with 12 months, each one with a variable number of days from 28 to 31. And we may not love it, but we use it. But what if…there were a better way?
I started thinking about this at first when I watched Kurzgesagt’s video, which argues that we should find a new year “0” that better reflects the sheer magnitude of all that we have accomplished as a species. They end up settling on 10000 BC/BCE as the appropriate year “0”, for reasons that they describe in the video. In practice, in order to use the Human Era system, we just tack on an extra “1” at the beginning of the year. So the year 2020 AD/CE becomes the year 12,020 HE (Human Era).
That got me thinking, though, that there must be a better way to distribute the days of the year. I mean, the sheer madness that is the Gregorian calendar would be hilarious if it weren’t so ingrained into us. Instead of each month having a fixed number of days (possibly with some minor adjustment at the end to account for imperfections), we end up with a monstrosity where you have to memorize the number of days in each month. Of course, this happened because the calendar was iteratively refined due to increased knowledge about exactly how long one revolution around the sun takes, adding/subtracting months to please Roman emperors, and so on. But if we were to design a calendar from scratch, what might it look like?
Continue reading “Rethinking the Calendar and Our Measures of Time”