Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Christian Long on the Facebook Group asks Why can’t we have a metric calendar? Not going to happen, but the seasons and months could make more sense. Maybe 10 months, 36 days each, and an extra 5 days split between the new months Novembicus and Decembicus due to all the holidays.

OK. You aren’t the first person to have thought of this and there have been many proposals to do something like this.

The basic problem with all of the proposals is that days, months, and years do not divide evenly into each other.

Months, days, and years are all natural units of time. Creating a 36-day month would pretty much eliminate any correlation of the month to the natural lunar month.

There have been attempts at trying to decimalize everything, including splitting the day into 10 units, and splitting those into 10 units.

A metric system of units for things like length, weight, and temperature, all make sense because all of those units are arbitrary units. The second, meter, and kilogram are all things we just made up.

The second is somewhat arbitrary, but the day, month, and year are not.

The big reason for not doing this, however, is that there really isn’t any benefit to do so.

We’d have to totally change every history book, every clock, every watch…. everything.

There are enough alternative calendar concepts out there that I could probably do an entire episode on the subject.