So, we're getting to year 2017 of the gregorian calendar, an historically unscientific and inadequate roman calendar that's been imposed on the whole world. It's about time we adopted a universal scientific calendar that everyone can relate to and that can better represent the progress of human achievements.
Welcome to year 12,017 of the anthropocene, the historical era beginning with the first large-scale human endeavors.
I imagine that at this point changing to a different date standard would be way more work than it's worth
Pretty much.
Kinda like a roommate I had who evangelized using Tau instead of Pi and base 12 instead of base 10. Nifty, but a waste of breath overall.
It's literally just adding a single digit in front of gregorian dates.
And it doesn't even need to be retroactive (since the gregorian dates would still be perfectly intelligible)
The payoff of it being a calendar system that is actually meaningful. And that such a calendar could be legitimately universalised. I mean, how lazy can people get?
Maybe they mean retroactively, or maybe document wise. Changing passports, birth certificate, getting governments to recognize that you were born on in 11980's, and not 1980's would be difficult.
I saw that video a week ago or so. It's pretty great.
It really doesn't need to be retroactively changed anywhere, since the first digit could always be assumed as implicit. Generally, when people talk about "the 90's", we can guess that they mean "two decades ago" even though the century and millenia are implicit, otherwise they would specify it as "the 1890's".
The only thing that would need to actively be done is for it to become commonplace in everyday use that people use terms like "beyond anthropocene" and "anthropocene era" instead of "beyond christ" and "anno domini" from then on. (Or just "beyond human era" and "human era" if "anthropocene" is still too complex for common usage.)
It's practically only a semantic change. But it means a lot.
So, let's replace one arbitrary date with another one? What's the point?
If anything, much more appropriate date would be the one when this site became a trash dump two thousands years later, starting the grand history of us fucking up our planet.
Current date + 10^4 is legitimate? WUT?
Ummmm, everyone knows that the earth is only 6000 yrs old. The primordial era, dinosaurs front to back, emergence of primitive man, then homo sapiens, then the internet.
Do you even watched the video?
Some arbitrary dates are better choices than others, due to having better reasons to choose them over another arbitrary date. The point isn't that it is arbitrary, it's that it can be applied worldwide and is valid for every single person living on this dump.
And choosing a better arbitrary date over the one currently used worldwide is not even remotely a hard or demanding thing to do in this case.
You're having a lot of trouble convincing a half dozen people in this thread, I don't understand why you think it's easy or worthwhile to apply that to 7 billion people. Not to mention the billions of machines that need to have the same date standards in order to communicate.
Considering that people who wouldn't object to it don't have as much incentive to comment, it's not an outstanding amount. And still I haven't seen good arguments against what is essentially a reinterpretation of the same date standard, with the option of adopting a marginally different standard that would easily take the previous one into account to prevent incompatibilities.
As I said, this doesn't even need to be retroactive, since the essential part of the change is in the interpretation of the date standard, not in the actual format.
"2017" could just be understood as meaning "the year 12017 of whatever calendar", making abstraction of the first 10000 years (represented by the first digit).
As I said, it is mainly a semantic difference, which is not at all hard to implement unless your billions of machines somehow need to associate specifically implicit information to those dates in order to function properly. Which is not the case. Numerical calendars don't care about what "year X" means, as long as the numbers are consistent.
Change the year on your computer's time and tell me how well the internet works for you.
I spelled it out explicitly many times already. Changes like this do not need to be retroactive. "2016" is then just assumed to mean something different than it used to be assumed to mean.
This seems like an arbitrary metric to compete with an arbitrary metric.
You could then assume in 10,000 years someone would want to do something similar with space travel or something. The video was good though, and educational.
Yes, the whole point is to adopt a better arbitrary metric.
Yes, and if then humanity develops something else that would thoroughly revolutionize human existence like that, then why not? The point of having a "year zero" or a reference point in a timeline is that it's relevant and meaningful for the people who use that timeline.
"Because we can relate to it" is a better reason for adopting a given reference point than "because some people use it".
Well the metric we have no works just fine. The only reason the video explains why we should do this is to feel better about ourselves and where we've come from.
It does absolutely nothing but add a 1 in front of the number we already use. It's pointless. The idea is sound, but it's still pointless.