Comment by avhception
15 hours ago
Haha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
15 hours ago
Haha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
I find it a bit silly. When we refer to 70 CE or 500 CE we don’t add zeros in front.
It's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
It’s so arbitrary. We have at least a few hundred million years before Earth is entirely uninhabitable. Why not use 000001931, then? Not ambitious enough, I guess.
Our written history already goes back over 6,000 years. We can actually understand what people back then wrote. We don’t need unbroken year numbering, or leading zeros, to understand that. The calendar has been reset and changed multiple times. It seems like a mis-focus on something that doesn’t really matter.