[helmsb]

I’ve always been fascinated by alternative calendars (also alternative timekeeping). However, barring an apocalyptic event, I don’t for see any alternative calendars taking off.

For most of human history, we didn’t need a standardized calendar, you just needed to agree with people that you interacted with. Religion pushed most of the standardization and later reinforced during the Industrial Revolution—helped along by colonialism.

Now that we are a globalized society, it would require parties from every nation and every industry to agree to the change and coordinate a simultaneous migration. Given we can’t get close to that level of cooperation when faced with potentially existential crises, it’s doubtful we could do it because it’s a “better” system than the current one.

I’d love to be proven wrong though!

[NoZebra120vClip]

Just imagine the state of the world in 1582, and the amount of cooperation, agreement, and coordination that it took to implement the Gregorian Calendar, which was an incremental iteration of the Julian one. Take the chaos and confusion created by that (and rippling into present times) and multiply it by ten or so, and then you may perhaps approach what it'd be like to change calendars today.