It seems odd to me that modern civilisation still measures time based on a religious event.
The dominant global calendar – whether labelled AD (Anno Domini) or rebranded as CE (Common Era) – remains numerically anchored to the traditional date of the birth of Jesus. While this has deep historical and cultural roots, it is ultimately a theological reference point that persists by convention rather than necessity.
Calendars are practical tools, so most people accept this without complaint. But as our challenges increasingly span geological timescales, planetary boundaries, and potentially multiple inhabited worlds, the limitations of religion-anchored timekeeping become harder to ignore.
If we were designing a calendar today from first principles — without religion, culture, or human privilege – what would we choose?
Calendar Based on Science, Not Belief
A non-religious calendar needs a physical anchor: an event that predates humanity and belongs to no culture.
At the largest scale, such an anchor already exists – the formation of the universe itself.
Cosmology places this event at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, with well-characterised uncertainty. This provides a natural root reference for all timekeeping, independent of planets, species, or human civilisations.
This root frame could be called the Universal Physical Era (UPE).
UPE is not intended for everyday use. It functions as a universal reference layer – analogous to absolute coordinates in physics – allowing any local calendars to be related without privileging any one world or culture.
Planetary Era (PE) – Globally Consistent Local Civil Time
Humans don’t live at cosmological scales. Civil calendars must remain local, practical and familiar.
From UPE, we can derive an entire family of Planetary Era (PE) calendars, each anchored to the formation of a specific planet and used for that planet’s local civil time.
Earth Planetary Era (EPE)
For Earth, the physical anchor is well established.
Radiometric dating of meteorites, lunar samples, and the oldest terrestrial minerals consistently places Earth’s formation at approximately 4.54 billion years ago.
Geoscience already measures time this way using ‘years before present’, where “present” is formally defined as 1950-01-01 00:00:00 UTC – an internationally accepted scientific convention adopted for practical, not cultural, reasons.
The Earth Planetary Era (EPE) simply extends this existing scientific framework into civil timekeeping.
Definition (EPE):
- Epoch: Earth’s formation, defined as 4.54 × 10⁹ years before 1950-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
- Units: seconds, days, months, and years unchanged.
- Calendar structure: Gregorian, for full compatibility.
Nothing about clocks, leap years, or months changes. Only the year numbering does.
So, What Year is it Now?
Late 2025 corresponds to 4,540,000,075 EPE.
But that wouldn’t be practical for use day-to-day. So a shorthand display format would be used… 4.54/075 EPE.
‘4.54’ represents Earth’s age in billions of years and ‘075’ is the current year within the present million-year block.
In speech and casual writing, the minimal form works exactly like existing usage… “75 EPE” or “seventy-five Earth Planetary Era”.
Why Perspective Matters
Calendars do more than just organise social schedules – they help shape perspective.
Anchoring time to a religious or cultural event reinforces:
- Short-term horizons.
- Human centrality.
- The assumption that civilisation sits near the centre of history.
Anchoring time to a 4.5-billion-year-old planet, nested within a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, places human history where it belongs: recent, fragile, and contingent.
This is not symbolism. It aligns civil timekeeping with:
- Geological and climate timescales.
- Established scientific practice.
- AI systems that already operate on absolute timelines.
- Long-term thinking about planetary stewardship.
A Calendar System that Scales Beyond Earth
A multi-planetary civilisation cannot continue to remain Earth-centric.
The Planetary Era model scales naturally:
- EPE — Earth Planetary Era
- MPE — Mars Planetary Era
- VPE (Venus), LPE (Lunar), and others as required…
Each planet uses its own formation-anchored civil calendar for local life, while all remain interoperable through UPE as a universal physical reference.
No calendar reset is required when humans leave Earth.
Adoption Through Coexistence
This is not a call to abolish existing calendars.
Like most successful standards, adoption would begin quietly through dual dating:
1 January 2026 (76 EPE)
Unlike many calendar reforms, this proposal does not ask people to abandon familiar structures – only to remove a cultural assumption that many already feel uneasy about, while gaining a clearer sense of scale in return.
A Simple Hierarchy for a New Calendar System
- UPE – universal physical time
- PE – a class of planet-anchored civil calendars
- EPE, MPE, … – local instances for other worlds
No religion. No privilege bias. No reset required ever!
Just science, applied consistently.
This proposal is offered as a practical convention. Its usefulness will determine whether it survives the test of time!
Proposed by James Good
Date: 4.54/075-12-29 (29/12/25)
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