I’m big on the ‘what if’s in everything. Recently, thinking about our format of months and years, it occurred to me that our Georgian calendar system is flawed, and that a lunar system would make more sense.
If the moon’s cycle is ~28 days (in its sidereal orbit), that’s a good round four weeks per month. Add in the fact that we observe a leap day every four years…do some calculations…and you come out to roughly 13 months per lunar year. So why don’t we observe the calendar as it corresponds to the lunar cycle?
Heck if I know…but because we keep discovering more and more about human history and the planet’s history every day, it’s hard for anyone to say what year it’d be even if we could all agree on the same calendar (because we all don’t). The strangest thing of all, however, is our perception of time and our reliance on it to be a progressive society. We constantly use 2000 as a marking point for why we need to advance technologically. If calendars worked such that we were still in the 1900’s, would we be trying as hard to advance in certain fields?
That’s not where I was trying to go with the monologue, but the point is that we may not be when we think we are, and we probably shouldn’t rely on that when to drive us forward in history…
…cause if you use 13 28-day months per year, just from 45 BC, we’d currently be in 1896 instead of 2009. I’m just sayin.
