Re: Concalendrical reference point

Tim May:
> Note that this thread is of marginal topicality, but I can't think of
> a better place to ask.
conculture@yahoogroups.com

> I've been trying to develop a calendar.  It's just a standard calendar
> for use on Earth, with no speacal concultural associations.  I'm
> fairly happy with the mechanics of the thing, but one question
> troubles me - from what date to start the long count of years?  I
> could just start it from when I finish the calendar (or that year,
> anyway - I'm thinking of having the year start at the vernal equinox,
> like the Vorlin calendar) but that seems to perhaps attach too much
> importance to the creation of the calendar itself.  I'm unable to
> decide on any one event of such importance in history.  So one idea I
> had was to simply take the earliest recorded event which can be
> precisely dated (at least to the year) with a reasonable degree of
> certainty. So my question is, does anyone know what that event is?
> (Preferably not an astronomical observation, as we only know these
> with accuracy because we can project them back in time, and could do
> this in theory regardless of contemporary records - but another event
> recorded with reference to an astronomical event would be fine.)
This is an unsolved problem of longstanding for Livagian reckoning too.
On the one hand, naming years by numbers is a method of great utility
in calculating the time distance between two years, but on the other
hand the issue of where to locate year 1 is a troublingly arbitrary
one, for which no decent candidate has yet emerged in my thinking.

My current plan is to locate Year 1 arbitrarily/randomly far back before
the supposed beginning of the universe. That would mean no BCE-type
backward numbering and would elevate the arbitrariness of the
decision to a principle of its design. By this system, then, we
might be in the 98784660508th year since the beginning of the
calendar. Of course, when citing a date, you would cite only the
numbering within the most relevant subdivisions of time (like
decade or century or millennium).

--And.

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