New Calendar

Completely invented by me to allow certain events to be moved forwards, so that they’re still in the future (at least for now). Rather than developing an elaborate calendar off my own bat, I discovered the symmetry 454 calendar developed by Dr. Irv Bromberg.

Once I decided to create my own date calculator spreadsheet, I moved away from Dr. Bromberg’s very accurate and complex calendar. I discovered that there really is absolutely nothing new under the sun and based my own calendar on a very similar idea developed by F.A. Black in “Problems in Time and Space” published around 1910. The calendar’s described on pages 129 to 171. You can read the whole thing for free on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/problemsintimesp00blacrich. It’s in the public domain, too.

I’ve made a few cosmetic changes to my version, mainly by starting the week and the calendar on Monday, the international standard “first day of the week” instead of Sunday, and by having the “leap weeks” in summer rather than winter. It’s a matter of personal preference, but the idea of Christmas and Hogmanay moving closer and further apart on different years strikes me as a nightmare when you start considering having to go back to work between the two holidays, and the problems with travelling at all if the weather’s bad. Some extra time in summer (in the northern hemisphere, of course) strikes me as much easier to deal with. You won’t need the heating on an extra week, either.

The leap weeks occur in years divisible by five, but not by 50, and in years divisible by 400 (much easier for my spreadsheet abilities, and I’m still not sure my spreadsheet works properly over the whole range of dates).

The “New Calendar” era is pretty much arbitrary, since it has to place the “new” 1992 to 1996 towards the end of World War III, which we know (from “Star Trek: First Contact” and “Star Trek: Enterprise”) to have finished in “old calendar” 2053. Balancing this with the “Common Era” calendar, I get Monday 1st January, 1 “New Calendar” era to be Monday 1st January, 57 C.E. 1992 to 1996 in the “New Calendar” therefore corresponds to 2048 to 2052. That’s close enough for me.

It does raise the big question of “why?” “Just because it fits” is the honest answer, but it isn’t very satisfying. It wasn’t until I began grappling with how to make the calendar work on a spreadsheet that I realised that Monday 1st January, 1900 “New Calendar” would be Monday 2nd January, 1956 C.E.. Coincidentally, the first really accurate time measurements based on atomic clocks were made in the mid-50’s, not to mention the start of the space age in November 1957. Although it might seem odd at first sight, what if the “New Calendar” era was worked out to be “spreadsheet-friendly”, with the period from 1900 based on accurately calibrated time sequences? And the launch of “Sputnik” would be on Friday 5th October, 1901 “New Calendar”. I’d be the first to admit it’s grasping at straws, but it’s the best I could come up with. It does mean that the start of the era isn’t linked to any significant political or religious event, making it “non-regional” and “non-denominational”, and a suitable base for a world calendar.

To avoid confusion, and the merciless exposure of my spreadsheet’s shortcomings, the “calendar converter” front page will only display “New Calendar” dates during the time they were supposedly being used: Monday 1st January, 2046 C.E., Monday 1st January, 1990 “New Calendar” to Sunday 31st December, 2079 C.E., Sunday 28th December, 2023 “New Calendar”.
In the end, it’s just a blatant attempt to shift some of the more problematic bits of the “Star Trek” future history back into the future. Other solutions to the big question of when the Eugenics Wars happened have been proposed. This is what I’ve come up with, since it manages to address some other problems, too. You may prefer something else.

by StrauchiusStrauchius on 04 Nov 2014 12:07, last updated on 10 Nov 2014 15:18