Let's go a step farther and reset the year counting from Jesus to L Ron Hubbard's death. Either that or reset on the singularity, but I'm impatient.

[EDIT] I've just been informed LRH didn't completely die. I'll petition for the singularity reset.

There already exists a notion of "the human era" that adds exactly 10,000 to the current year:

> The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution, when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

(Of course, the choice to add exactly 10,000 is a compromise to make it trivial to interconvert between HE and AD.)

You can even buy Human Era calendars: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar

decades too

The current century being the 21st will make that very confusing.

The 2000/2001 start of the 21st century is reasonable debate. Mathematically, 2001 makes sense. In terms of being excited during the 1999→2000 transition with all the digits incrementing, it makes more sense socially to have celebrated the new millennium and century then.

So, the first century in the Current Era would be 99 years? There's no year 0. A century is any quantity of 100, go crazier: 1946 to 2045!!!

How long did hundred years war last? Let's redefine hundred to that.

We can include a year called 0 in the first century, no problem.

All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one.

> All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one.

But it’s not one, it’s 0

For that matter let’s get rid of the asinine BC system and just use negative years AD.

The thing that gets me is that when they invented the CE notation, they went to the trouble of inventing a “BCE” notation for BC. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!

Also while we are fixing broken modular arithmetic, let’s add a proper modulo division operator to all the languages that got % wrong :)

What you want is called "astronomical year numbering" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering), so you have 1 BC = 0, 2 BC = -1, and so on. Astronomers are about the only people who would need to do math on negative years.

That numbering would be confusing. No one says "zeroth." The first of a set is always "first." The first century is the first 100 years counting from the first day of the first year of the common era.

The 20th century started on Jan 1, 2001. Because there was no year 0 (1 AD/CE started immediately after BC/E), 1/1/0001 was the beginning of the first century which ended on the last day of 100 CE, exactly one hundred years later.

So, which century are you skipping to make this work? I think we all have our preferences.

Considering the magnitudes of the celebrations of the new millennium and 21st century on Jan 1 2000 vs 2001, I’d say that argument has been comprehensively won by the zero indexers already.