In the very first sentence, I appreciate what I think is an intentional use of five digit year formatting.
The Long Now Foundation isn’t getting caught with its pants down in an amateur Y10K bug!
“YYYYY” FTW
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Long Now charter member here:
Yes, they try to do that everywhere as part of their "long term thinking" mission.
http://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digi...
Disappointing that they would go for a 5 digit year, and not use the HE calendar, in which the current year is 12019
From Wikipedia:
"The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
To me, it seems a little redundant to add a fixed 10,000 even if t0 is "near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution". So, so me using 02019 is just as arbitrarily as good.
The problem is that 02019 is not arbitrary, it is counting up from the traditional birth date of Jesus Christ.
Many take issue with the continued use of a religious calendar in post-enlightenment society, and everybody knows that calling it "common era" is silly, because 1. It's a meaningless phrase, 2. It's audibly ambiguous, and 3. It's about as effective at covering up the ecumenical meaning as a happy face sticker is for covering a severed arm.
Counting from the approximate dawn of civilization is a far more appropriate measure. The fact that it matches up with the AD calendar after year 10000 is a nice bonus.
The reason for the 10000 years is to make explicit the real magnitud of our history, you would be surprised to learn the number of people that believe it all really started just 2000 years ago.
Aboriginal Australians have been documented from 50,000-60,000 [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people-first...
When you begin to look into their stories (dreamtime) and the way they've always lived and more importantly, the way they have passed down information generation to generation, it's utterly remarkable. Yet this 10,000 value would belittle that rich living history imho.
Admittedly 10,000 years ago is roughly the Younger Dryas era, so yes, most history has been lost since before that time, but it does exist nevertheless.
To me it feels oddly pretentious and out of touch... Ozymandian I guess. Even reminds me a bit of the calendar that started 97 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_Fascista
I disagree. I like the optimism and think it lends a sense of scale to human endeavors.
Found out that they are building a 10,000 year clock