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Author Topic: The Dating Problem  (Read 4411 times)

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Offline gallienus1

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The Dating Problem
« on: December 07, 2016, 07:42:55 pm »

When we date the present or the past we date according to religious tradition. This is the end of the year 2016 AD if you use the widely used Gregorian Christian calendar, based on the believed time of the birth of Jesus (unconvincingly modified to 2016 CE to appease non-Christians).

If you are Hebrew it is AM 5777, if Muslim the year is 1438 AH.

There is a proposal to secularise the calendar by dating from the first known major human construction. This is dated to around 10,000 BC and so that would place the present secular calendar date to the year 12,000. As most of the world uses the Gregorian Christian calendar for economic and social convenience, this date can be slightly modified to 12,017, the months and days remaining as before.

See- 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs

The only problem I have dating the Human Era from Gobekli Tepe is there is no guarantee we will not find a still earlier significant temple structure. Also, there is talk of adding the Technosphere to the Earths Lithosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere and Biosphere.  The Technosphere is all our buildings, structures, roads, general infrastructure, dumps and machines in combined mass. It is estimated to be about 30 trillion tons, or roughly 50 kg for every square meter of Earth’s surface.

See-

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/technosphere/

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-technosphere-now-weighs-30-trillion-tons/

http://www.livescience.com/57090-earths-heavyweight-technosphere.html

If we accept the beginning of the Technosphere as the true beginning of the Human Era, then prehistoric waste dumps would have to be included. These can be very ancient indeed, The oldest shell middens in the world are about 140,000 years old, from South African sites like Blombos Cave. Shell middens in Australia made by Aboriginal hunter-gatherers can cover hectares and be over 15 meters high, and some may date back before Gobekli Tepe.

Should we make a change? Or is it simply too hard in the face of entrenched custom?

Steve


Offline n.igma

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2016, 08:39:47 pm »
I simply ask Why?

What improvement comes from that proposed? None at all in my opinion.

Provided the reference point for any dating is clear, all can be calculated form that point, including that which precedes it.

Seems like there are too many academics chasing to few new ideas with no merit.

Hence we have this sort of proposal that amounts to little more than the contemporary version of the medieval debate concerning how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, and its just about as useful!

If we want to be accurate and precise with no scope for variation then go for dating from the start of the observable universe 13.772 billion years ago (plus/minus 59 million years).

My oh my, that will make Year 2K (the greatest fraud of the twentieth century) look like a walk in the park!
All historical inquiry is contingent and provisional, and our own prejudices will in due course come under scrutiny by our successors.

Offline gallienus1

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2016, 11:54:47 pm »

The argument goes that dating the present at 2016 AD gives a completely distorted picture of human history. By starting 12,000 years ago the Human Era calendar corrects this by showing the technological achievement of humanity to be linear for by far the greater part of human civilization, only becoming exponential in the last few hundred years.

The Gregorian calendar is based on a religious event that does not have universal acceptance, and using it has already caused annoyance with some people of other religions.

It only has real cultural meaning to the West, for the civilizations of China, India, South East Asia and the Americas it has no relevance as a date marking point to measure the time spans of their civilizations. 

The 2016 AD date is unnecessarily complicated, having year zero well into human history means you must count backwards from the birth of Christ expressing dates as progressively larger negative numbers. To determine how long ago an event was in Classical Greece you must convert the negative BC number to a positive one then add 2016 years.

Even as a religious based calendar based on Christian history 2016 AD is incorrect as we now now it is not counting forward from the real date of the birth of Jesus.

All good reasons for change, if you think it is worth the effort.

Best regards,
 
Steve


Offline n.igma

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2016, 12:47:39 am »
Respectfully, I suggest you're overstating a non-problem. It is not complicated at all and an App for those so weakly numerate to find it complicated could be knocked up in a few minutes.  As for the cultural arguments, we run into all sorts of problems of political correctness so I wont even go there.

As for the proposed starting point of the "Human Era" calendar 12,000 years ago its just as arbitrary as the supposed date of the birth of Christ.

And what of Aboriginal rock art dating to 40,000 BC? Do we dismiss it as as irrelevant to the "Human Era" and the start of the calendar?

I have a small flint scraper I picked up on the sand adjacent to a rock ledge in what is now desert at Wadi Rum in Jordan. I am advised that it potentially dates to 14,000 BC. So technological development was underway well before the proposed start of the "Human Era" calendar. I guess we just dismiss that inconvenient truth? Or do we come back for more academic funding in a few decades to move the Year 0/1 even further back in time?  

Most certainly, the "Human Era" started before 10,000 BC and the human genome mapping project proves that point. Better still our oldest ancestor, the earliest known chordate, Pikaia gracilens, is dated 505 million years ago marking the time at which we started our divergence from the arthropods and the like. Why not start there on the path that bring us to Homo sapiens?

Now turning my attention to how many angels fit on the head of a pin ......
All historical inquiry is contingent and provisional, and our own prejudices will in due course come under scrutiny by our successors.

Offline Enodia

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2016, 01:25:58 am »
damn, and i came to this thread thinking i was going to meet somebody.   :(

Offline n.igma

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #5 on: December 08, 2016, 04:40:41 am »
You're right. I probably came on a bit too hard and cynical.

But my point is that in this we seem to have a solution searching for a problem.

And that solution would throw up equally as many issues as it purports to address.

And that is before we even consider the costs and technical implications of implementing the solution (remember Year 2K and the billions wasted on that little exercise that precipitated the collapse of tech bubble due to the fact that about five years of technology capital expenditure had been advanced into 1998-1999 so that sales evaporated come 2000).
All historical inquiry is contingent and provisional, and our own prejudices will in due course come under scrutiny by our successors.

Offline Xenophon

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #6 on: December 08, 2016, 06:20:55 am »
Speaking from my standpoint as an IT Consultant, the change would present the world with another Year 2000 problem were we to make the change. All computer programs handling dates would suddenly require an extra character space in order to store/display the year. Given the huge expense and difficulty involved with the Y2000 issue, I very much doubt that anybody would want to undertake that exercise again.

Offline *Alex

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2016, 06:22:36 am »
damn, and i came to this thread thinking i was going to meet somebody.   :(

;D

Offline Andrew McCabe

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #8 on: December 08, 2016, 07:06:47 am »
CE stands for Common Era as far as I, and much of the world, are concerned, and most academics now use BCE for earlier dates. It's an arbitrary random date to be sure. Life might be marginally simpler if AUC had been adopted as the common standard because 98% of recorded history and even all our ancient coinage falls after AUC 1, and Ab Urbe Condita fairly neatly encapsulates the division between recorded writing (excepting hieroglyphs and clay tablets and such like), with Homer being bang on the dot of AUC 1 or close enough, and of the start of the most advanced phases Western and Eastern (Chinese, Japanese) art and American settlement records. It would have been neat, as history prior to the foundation of Rome was mostly (apart from Egypt) fairly date unspecific, to have dating start when history became, suddenly, very date specific. But we have what we have and as just about the entire world operates with Common Era dating (including for all effective purposes those other monotheistic zones of the world that have, and express on coinage, their 'own' dating systems but celebrate 1st January more or less as we do), there would be no special advantage in changing. It's kind of like the sort of advantage that would accrue to everyone were we to move to a duodecimal system of counting. Theoretically very promising in efficiency savings but not going to happen.  

Offline Callimachus

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #9 on: December 08, 2016, 06:44:57 pm »
Quote: "There is a proposal to secularise the calendar by dating from the first known major human construction."

How about elaborating on this proposal -- Who or what organization? By what authority?  etc.

Offline gallienus1

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2016, 07:16:08 pm »

I suppose my interest in our historical dating systems stems from my university days when I was supersized to find a lot of hostility to the system among my Jewish friends, who were not satisfied with the change of title from AD to CE, as the date still begins with the Christian era.

Ironically talking to them now they could not care less, but that might only be the mellowing of age. (It is part of being young to get all hot and bothered by issues!)

Personally I think the case for change is good, but had not considered the IT angle mentioned by Xenophon. Change will come eventually but probably not within our lifetimes or even this century.

If the case for a change to historical dating is not strong enough at the moment, the case for a change in geological dating is strong enough. The concept of a Technosphere is the result of the overwhelming evidence for humans making monumental changes to the environment that will be clearly visible in the geological record millions of years from now.

The Holocene was the geological epoch which started some 11,500 years ago when the glaciers began to retreat is now over.

Welcome to the Anthropocene epoch.

Steve   


Offline Molinari

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2016, 07:34:38 pm »
There's also the BP scale, which I've seen used by some archaeologists:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present

I found it awkward because I think of events within the BCE/CE conceptual scheme.  It is more than just numbers and calculations.  It's basically a paradigm for a cultural group's conception of history.  I don't think anything less than a major cultural shift will change that.  Certainly not a bunch of academics arguing.

Offline gallienus1

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #12 on: December 08, 2016, 08:27:21 pm »
Thanks Molinari I'd forgotten the BP (years before present)!

It can claim to be ideologically neutral and easy to use.  However, as you say for a person used to the current BCE/CE system dates around the Hellenistic period to the Early Empire can be hard to reference and relate to each other. That is because we are used to having another reference point, the traditional birth date of Jesus, apart from the present date as a second reference point to help separate the two.

I have noticed over the years that friends in the life sciences when talking of events of the past usually use BP.

Offline SC

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #13 on: December 08, 2016, 08:36:06 pm »
The answer is simple.  We need to return to the use of reigns.

Today is therefore "Thursday, the 322nd day of the eighth year of the reign of Obama".

Next Valentines day, for example, will be "Tuesday, the 25th day of the first year of the reign of Trump".

So much simpler than any alternative......

SC
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Offline gallienus1

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #14 on: December 08, 2016, 09:00:53 pm »

Excellent Shawn!

My wife would agree, except we should date from BE, the birth date of the real king!

That would make it Year 81.

Best regards,

Steve

Offline Sap

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #15 on: December 09, 2016, 03:47:04 am »
There are three problems with the proposal, as I see it.

The first: the precise dating of the event being used as the basis for Year 1 is as yet up for debate. What if, in two hundred years time, we have an extremely precise date for the foundation of Gobekli Tepe, and it turns out to be actually 11,089 BC? We'd have created a calendar even more "inaccurate" and meaningless as the AD calendar it's supposed to replace. Further, what if in two hundred years time, we find more, even older, cities? Again, we've rendered the basis for our entire calendar meaningless.

The second: your solution to the current imprecision in our knowledge  - by simply adding exactly 10000  to the current AD date - does not truly get away from the "AD problem". It is still, fundamentally, linked to the AD calendar. I can't see Jews or Muslims being fooled by what would surely seem to them to be a weak attempt at "covering up" the link to the AD calendar.

Third: one could argue that using a single, very specific fact from a single, very specific branch of human knowledge, is still a somewhat parochial view on what is "the most important event in history", upon which the calendar should be centred. An archaeologist might well think the oldest piece of archaeology is important. An astronomer, on the other hand, would think that the oldest known astronomical observations might be important. An art historian would think that the oldest known piece of art would be important. A modern historian might consider the launch of the first satellite, or the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, as worthy candidates for a new Year Zero. No-one can agree which of these dates might be actually more meaningful or significant, in the grand scheme of things.

Many other "alternate calendars" already exist and are used daily, in their own parochial spheres of interest. Observational astronomers, for example, already have and use their own concept of an "independent" calendar: the "Julian date" (not to be confused with the Julian Calendar) which recognizes Day 1 as January 1st, 4713 BC, a date somewhat arbitrarily chosen as being the last confluence of three astronomical cycles, and as being (hopefully) a date older than any possible surviving astronomical observation records - so they'd never have to refer to negative dates. The current Julian Day is 2,457,731.

Finally, to address the argument that using a Christian-derived calendar somehow imposes, elevates or legitimizes Christianity above all other religions and worldviews in a society that uses it: I would just point out that the names of our months are not Christian-derived, but rather, originate from the ancient pagan-derived Roman calendar. Does calling the first month of our year "January" legitimize the belief in and worship of Janus? Does using a calendar where the seventh month is named "July" imply that you agree with the deification of Julius Caesar? I doubt most of the people who use the English-language AD calendar in their daily lives are even aware of these derivations.
I'll have to learn Latin someday.

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #16 on: December 09, 2016, 07:59:56 am »
Well said Sap!  +++

*Alex

Offline Joe Sermarini

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #17 on: December 09, 2016, 08:15:25 am »
I propose we accept this idea and establish that it is now 12,017.  I further propose that we abbreviate this new dating system by dropping the first digit.
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Offline *Alex

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #18 on: December 09, 2016, 08:32:48 am »
I second that!  ;D

Offline ickster

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #19 on: December 12, 2016, 10:22:34 pm »
I propose we accept this idea and establish that it is now 12,017.  I further propose that we abbreviate this new dating system by dropping the first digit.

 +++ +1

Offline n.igma

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #20 on: December 12, 2016, 11:19:35 pm »
I propose we accept this idea and establish that it is now 12,017.  I further propose that we abbreviate this new dating system by dropping the first digit.

I am reliably informed that this pragmatic proposal has been accepted and will be formalized in a little over 18 days time.
All historical inquiry is contingent and provisional, and our own prejudices will in due course come under scrutiny by our successors.

Offline Meepzorp

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #21 on: December 24, 2016, 01:04:31 pm »
Hi folks,

I propose that we start year 1 of the human calendar with the year that Meepzorp's ancestors (aliens from outer space) first landed on the Earth and mated with primates to create the human race. :)

Seriously, I agree with n.igma.

Being someone from a physics and engineering background, I've learned in numerous classrooms that "all things are relative". For example, it's like the old puzzle where an ant is walking inside a railroad car of a moving train. How fast is the ant moving? In what direction? Relative to what? Relative to the train? Relative to the Earth? Relative to the Sun? Relative to the center of mass of the Milky Way galaxy? You need to pick an arbitrary reference point and use that as your baseline. The same is true for a human calendar.

Meepzorp

Offline Joe Sermarini

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #22 on: December 25, 2016, 10:54:21 am »
I don't have any dating problem. I have been married over 21 years. I don't date.
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Offline Enodia

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #23 on: December 25, 2016, 10:46:10 pm »
I don't have any dating problem. I have been married over 21 years.

probably the most relevant thing in this thread. congratulations Joe, well done!

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Offline SC

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Re: The Dating Problem
« Reply #24 on: December 26, 2016, 12:43:32 pm »
I don't have any dating problem. I have been married over 21 years. I don't date.

Groan!

That had to be the best worst joke of the year!   :laugh:

Shawn
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