[XparentX]

Inventing new time concepts, now and then, is very narrow sighted.

Think of archaeologists in 1000 years from now come over documents with 100 different time concepts.

B.C. and A.D. suffice, anything else is political nonsense or anti-religious propaganda.

[drcode]

I think you missed the most important point, in that radiologic dating after 1950ish is a lot less accurate due to nuclear testing- It would ABSOLUTELY be important for an archeologist in 1000 years to have special knowledge about these changes around the year 1950 in order to do their job properly.

[stagger87]

I like that a lot of textbooks and history books are moving over to BCE/CE. I don't consider it propaganda.

[throwaway37585]

They are numerically equivalent.

[rhplus]

AD/BC has a fundamental counting flaw [1] which is accounted for by ISO 8601 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Years

[dfxm12]

I wonder what the practical side effects are of being off by one when discussing events that happened c. thousands of years ago.

[XparentX]

I agree, but (I don’t want to start any flame wars here) there is a well known narrative that explains the AD and BC. It has been around in 2000 years and will probably be around some 1000 years more.

In Sweden we have been discussing about what type of signs should we put up to warn for nuclear waste. Will people in thousand of years be able to understand and decide the warnings?

Same with time concepts, the future must have a sporting chance to understand what we where talking about.

[antonvs]

> B.C. and A.D. suffice, anything else is political nonsense or anti-religious propaganda.

You should read up on the history of the Common Era to correct your parochial misconceptions.

[hnbroseph]

> or anti-religious propaganda

i think this is misleading if not a bit ethnocentric (or rather religiocentric?). the islamic, jewish and hindi calendars all have different numbered years, and presumably most others.

to turn this around, the fixation on AD and rejection of other proposals could be described as christian supremacist 'propaganda'. it 'suffices' because it accommodates to your comfort and privilege.

[mcguire]

Given that dates in the past were often counted from the beginning of the reign of the local king, they're probably used to it.

[sp332]

A.D. is the exact same tradition as that, just continued indefinitely. (It's an abbreviation of the Latin for "Year of Our Lord".)