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Comment by gxt | Hacker News Reader

Why Anno Domini again? If we want to be future proof surely we can't base the calendar on mythology.

An absolute system of tracking years needs a datum point, which is arbitrary. Using a traditional one at least confers the benefit of being able to relatively easily read dates as written in the last few hundred years.

AUC fits your criteria and mine.

We base it on convention, the common era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era

Religious people understand the value of sticking to the now arbitrary choice since Jesus wasn't born on 0001-01-01. I assume areligious people can, too.

Areligious, atheist, etc. Presupposes that religion, dogmas, sects are the default state of being. It isn't. Urban is, I think, a more accurate description when it is defined as anti-sectarian.

I agree with you the year's got to be arbitrary in practice, however I don't understand how your statement answers my concern about using mythology, can you elaborate on that?

Everything's mythology, one way or the other. By turning some other arbitrary point into the new calendar year 0, you will mythologize it.

True, but people don't commit crimes against humanity in the name of any arbitrary mythologies, only certain ones. We shouldn't propagate those kind of myths any further.

Do you mythologize SI units?

Technically, many of them are named after famous scientists, so the possibility is certainly there. Who knows what people will think of our Lord Kelvin 10,000 years later. Maybe eventually we will have to change those names, too, if they become dirty, rightfully or not.

Do you really need a burner account for this conversation?

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