Ask HN: Will We Rethink Calendars? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will We Rethink Calendars?

7 pointskamphey15 comments

In the past the whole world used different calendars and ways to represent time. Currently a few religions still have alternative cale dars. In the near future do you think calendars will be vastly different than now?

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'Day' as a subscription service.

If you don't pay, you will not get the new day.

It'll be crept in through a Total Recall style augmented sleep where a week long holiday seems teally only takes a night's sleep.

When normalised, leisure time will becme a subscription service.

This was the plot of the Justin Timberlake film In Time.

Everybody stops aging and time becomes a currency. Run out of it and you die.

Rich people drive at walking speed for safety because they can still die in car crashes.

There's people who count days instead of months and dates, so called "ordinal dates". Military and flight are some examples.

There's people who count weeks instead of months and dates. "We're visiting my parents when we have our vacations in week 28". Incredibly annoying.

I think our modern calendar is a result of when sun cults and moon cults mixed in the Mediterranean. The farther North you go, the more important are the yearly seasons (sun). They determine everything and are deeply embedded within the soul of people. Spring - summer - autumn - winter. Those are the important phases.

Then the farther South you go, the less important are the yearly seasons and the better way to track time is the moon. Especially as women's fertility is tied to the moon phases. So months become the standard of measure and are then conveniently divided into four weeks (28 can only be divided by two or four).

Damn, I was asking myself the same question and ended up making a 10-Day Week Calendar app: https://tendayweekcalendar.com/

Interesting idea. What inspired this schedule? Do you live by this week-to-week?

The French revolutionary calendar inspired this idea. But the French went too far IMO by introducing not just a 10-day week calendar but also decimal time, that's why, I think, this idea didn't take off. They also kept those weird month names they came up with.

Well, I don't strictly live by this calendar, but I try. I've made the app to make it easier for me to do this.

I predict around 2035 there will be a minor but annoying change.

Next century, so not near future, the leap seconds and leap days will break everything forcing a major calendar reform.

Interesting question. While I don't see a complete calendar overhaul anytime soon, I wonder if we'll see more region-specific tweaks to better align with local cultures and work patterns. For example, some Middle Eastern countries have already shifted their weekends to better sync with global markets. Maybe future tweaks will focus on optimizing productivity or aligning with the natural rhythms of remote work.

It's very possible that leap seconds will be a thing of the past. Those need active changes to the calendar, and there's every possibility that future generations will simply not care to make those adjustments.

Other than that, I don't think Gregorian calendars are going anywhere. Traditions have a way of overstaying their welcome, especially once they are automated.

I don't expect calendars, or time keeping in general, to change too much until we have civilizations in multiple planets (if we ever reach that point anyway). And even then, I doubt much would change here on Earth.

I think if we reach that point, we would probably look at the Earth calendars the same way we currently look at the Latin language.

Some countries are still on the imperial system. Calendars are even harder to change as they often hold a lot of cultural and religious meaning. Nobody's that attached to yards vs meters, but people are attached to Jan being the first month, Sunday the first day, Ramadan measured by the cycles of the moon, etc.

Swatch tried to use decimal time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time?wprov=sfl...

Stardate -297628.38156392693

Please don't do a tech reinvent / reimagine of calendars to exactly how they are now but with ads and a monthly charge.

Not really. The Earth still revolves once a day, and goes around the Sun once a year, and the Moon still goes around the Earth once a month. We can change the way we divide these periods but the periods themselves are fundamentally physical.

Example: https://sunclock.net/#calendar

The weekends and month names/dividers are ‘artificial’, but all the other lines — the days, moon phases, the equinoxes, solstices, apsides — are natural.

And the reality is that there is not many actually sensible ways to divide they number of days in year. 12 is pretty much best we can do. And being highly divisible it does work very nicely... So even without moon, it is one of the better options.

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