Cultural Value of AllTime

The Gregorian calendar has been growing in worldwide acceptance as the common business calendar due in part to Euro / American economic and military power. Yet 70 percent of the world's population is not Euro / American or Christian.  Therefore the basis era, the Christian era that underlies the Gregorian calendar, is a cultural anathema for many, if not most, people who use this calendar.

How might AllTime affect this issue?

In our overview we introduced AllTime in its most pure form. Pure AllTime would call this year 13.7B and next year would therefore be 13.7B 1. This would do away with all prior cultural calendars and start anew counting time from the Big Bang.  But it’s difficult to imagine that long held eras and calendric systems are going to be replaced by AllTime in the near future, so we have proposed that AllTime be wedded to the various eras presently in use. One might like to imagine this as a temporary measure until a global AllTime date is agreed upon and established.

We talked about the AllTime hybrid in Reversing Backward Time, and used the Gregorian calendar as our example with 13.7B 2004; but we can easily create other AllTime hybrids such as 13.7B 1424 Islamic or 13.7B 5764 Hebrew. Although pure AllTime would create the most universal calendar, the AllTime hybrid, using various cultural eras, may also have a profound effect on how we think about our shared history of time. 

Here’s why.

The majority of epochs in use today are: Gregorian, which calls this year 2004; Hebrew, which calls this year 5764; Chinese, which calls this year 4702; and the Islamic, which calls this year 1424.  The differences between these epochs are not larger than five thousand years. Although five thousand years may seem large in relationship to a lifetime, it is incredibly small in comparison to all of time to date.

Think of it this way; if you were to walk thirteen thousand feet along a beach, the last three grains of sand would represent five thousand years. (See .:.sands.:.of.:.time.:.) In other words, all of recorded human history would be reduced to a very tiny drop in a very large bucket.  

All cosmic, geological, and many early archeological numbers have error bars that exceed five thousand years. This means that these numbers are for every intent and purpose the same in any of these various cultural calendars.

One AllTime timeline would work for all systems in the vast preponderance of time, in fact, all the way up to those dates that were certain to within five thousand years.  Therefore AllTime Hybrid timelines are culturally shared and interchangeable for all but the smallest sliver of time. By adopting AllTime we can come to understand that our shared heritage far outweighs our differences.