Time for the Evolution of Time: A Comprehensive Proposal for Simpler, Human-Centric Clocks and Calendars

time4change

Modern timekeeping is a patchwork of ancient compromises that now fuels scheduling errors, health problems, and billions in avoidable costs. We can replace this complexity with a unified, mathematically clean framework that is easier to learn, healthier to live by, and cheaper to run.

1 Why Today’s Time Hurts

Current conventions survive only because they were inherited—not because they make sense.

1.1 Sexagesimal Relics

Sumerian finger-counting in base-60 bequeathed us 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, leaving 23.9h to a solar day.
Babylonian cuneiform tablets preserve this numeration, still visible in museums today.

Ancient Babylonian clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform script, representing the historical use of a base-60 number system.

1.2 Roman Politics and Gregorian Patches

The Roman ten-month calendar added January & February later for political optics, leaving irregular month lengths¹².
The monk Dionysius in 525 started A.D./B.C. counting our "years" since Jesus but miscalculated his birth year. Pope Gregory’s 1582 reform skipped 10 days to fix drift but kept the uneven pattern and omitted a year 0, complicating arithmetic with B.C./A.D. boundaries³⁴.

1.3 Operational Costs

Source of waste	Documented impact	Mechanism
Day-count conventions in finance	up to 1 pp change in quarterly GDP[^3]	Irregular month lengths distort economic series
Industrial output swings	> 5 pp per month[^3]	“Bridge-day” effects & variable workdays
Administrative scheduling	~12 manager-hours/week/firm⁵	Annual re-design of rosters and reports

A Johns Hopkins analysis estimates calendar chaos costs ≈ $130 billion annually in miscalculations and rescheduling⁶. It is hard to calculate long ranges, accounting for leaps, or uneven days in month-to-month ranges.

1.4 Health & Safety

Daylight-saving transitions raise accidents 6% the following week⁷⁸.
Living on the western edge of a time-zone increases cancer risk 5–10% via circadian misalignment[^2]⁹.

Comprehensive Analysis of Current Time System Problems and Proposed Solutions

2 Principles for a Better System

Decimal intuition – express time as percentages or powers of 10, matching other SI units.
Perennial predictability – identical calendar grids every year for friction-free planning.
Biological alignment – anchor local schedules to sunrise instead of artificial offsets.
Data-ready notation – a single numeric string parses cleanly by humans and computers.

3 Daily Percentage Time (d-time)

Legacy time	d-time	Mental rule
1 h	0.042 d	“4% of the day”
15 min	0.01 d	“≈1%”
2h 24m	0.1 d	"a tenth" or 2.4h
3:40 a.m.	0.15 d	hour × 0.04 + min/1440

Practical speech: “Spend two percent on lunch” ⇒ 0.02 d = 28 min 48 s.

4 A Perennial 36-Day 10-Month Calendar

4.1 Structure

10 months × 36 days = 360 days (+ 5/6d for year)
Each month: 6 weeks × 6 days
Fixed rest days: 5th, 11th, 17th, 23rd, 29th, 35th of every month, Fridays vary
Year-end 5 Celebration Days of 5 days (6 in leap years) for festivals, audits, backups.

This keeps quarters equal (3 months = 18 weeks = 108 days) and makes fiscal, academic, and project cycles perfectly regular.

4.2 Calendar Grid

█████████████████████████████████████████ 75% (6:00pm)

1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	*[23]*	24
25	26	27	28	29	30
31	32	33	34	35	36

3gc AI: 275d
3g 7m 23d
3.7.23.75d
(7/5/2025 6PM) (legacy)

4.3 Leap Logic

Add one festival day when the solar year demands, following: divisible by 4 ⟹ +1 unless divisible by 100 ⟹ –1 unless divisible by 400 ⟹ +1 unless divisible by 3200 ⟹ –1. Net drift < 1 day in 20 000 years—six times better than Gregorian.

5 Sunrise Universal Number (SUN)

Instead of “UTC+9” or “PDT–7,” reference local civil events to 6am sunrise = 0d

Work window: 0.1–0.5 d (08:36–5:00p old time).
Global conference call at 0.60 d means every participant meets ~14:24 after their own sunrise—no conversions.
Universal Standard: Can be written as 2025.7y 12.7d -0.7d
convert UTC offset hrs x 1.2 - 6 = SUN offset

5.1 Exponential Day Dating

Define long spans in scientific notation of days (d):

Big Bang ≈ 5 × 10¹² d
dc = "days of computers" since Unix epoch (1970-01-01)
Typical lifespan EU = 30Kdc ⇒ 82 y

This single-unit scale removes BCE/CE discontinuities and negative-zero confusion.

6 Historical Ages, Computer Gens

10000dc=1 generation, 10gc = 1 Era, 10 Eras = 1 Age = 1Mdc = 1000Kdc
Historic Age ⇢ 768 BCE (-1Mdc) - Mar 17, 1696
Science Era ⇢ Mar 17, 1696 (-1gc) - Dec 31, 1969
Computer Era ⇢ Jan 1, 1970 UTC (0day) - Oct 17, 2243
0th, Microprocessor Gen ⇢ Jan 1, 1970 - May 18, 1997
1st, Internet Gen ⇢ May 19, 1997 (1gc) - Oct 3, 2024
2nd, AI Gen ⇢ Oct 4, 2024 (2gc) - Feb 19, 2052

7 Standardized Numeric Formats

// Javascript for current _dc_
Date.now()/864e5

// dc of this generation of computing
Math.floor(Date.now()/864e5) % 10000;

July 5, 2025 4am UTC = 20274.4560dc or 274d (may omit 2g)
2025.6 y 4.63 d ⇢ six-tenths (months) into the year plus 4.63 days
40-75 %d ⇢ work hours of 9:30a-6pm (UTC sunrise at 7am)
0.75 d ⇢ sunset -+.05
2 %d ⇢ half an hour ("I'll see you in 2 percent after lunch break")

Conversion constants:

Unit	Conversion
1 gc	10,000 d
1 y	365.2425 d
1 d	0.002737 y = 86 400 s
1 s	0.000011574 d
1 h	0.041667 d = 3 600 s
1 min	0.000694 d = 60 s

8 Transitional Path

Embed d-time converters beside digital clocks; payroll already logs decimal hours.
Dual-label calendars for five years; software libraries publish ISO-36-Week tables.
International agencies switch fiscal reporting to perennial quarters; airlines adopt SUN in timetables.
DST laws sunset; sunrise-aligned civic hours phase in.

9 Expected Gains

Cut scheduling overhead > 80% by eliminating annual template rebuilding⁵⁶.
Reduce DST accident surge, saving hundreds of lives yearly⁷.
Synchronize remote teams without mental arithmetic, improving collaboration speed.
Provide children a time system they can reproduce with primary-school fractions, not phone apps.

10 Conclusion

We inherited hours, minutes, months, and time-zones from priests, emperors, and railroad barons. Their constraints are now ours to discard. A percentage day, a regular calendar, and sunrise-anchored locality restore timekeeping to human logic and biological sense.

1 Why Today’s Time Hurts​

1.1 Sexagesimal Relics​

1.2 Roman Politics and Gregorian Patches​

1.3 Operational Costs​

1.4 Health & Safety​

2 Principles for a Better System​

3 Daily Percentage Time (d-time)​

4 A Perennial 36-Day 10-Month Calendar​

4.1 Structure​

4.2 Calendar Grid​

4.3 Leap Logic​

5 Sunrise Universal Number (SUN)​

5.1 Exponential Day Dating​

6 Historical Ages, Computer Gens​

7 Standardized Numeric Formats​

8 Transitional Path​

9 Expected Gains​

10 Conclusion​

Footnotes​