Anno Nexus

Every generation has a feeling that the world has changed a lot throughout their lifetime. As for me, I feel that the ubiquitious connectivity we enjoy today is quite special and is an invention comparable in scale to language.

To give a shape to this feeling, I invented a more relevant dating system centered on a transition point representing that change. All dates before that point become Before Epoch, and all dates after that become Anno Nexus.

For that pivotal moment I chose the unix epoch which is as arbitrary as it is widely used - computer systems track date and time by counting the amount of seconds elapsed since the epoch started.

I chose Anno Nexus as a name because we are accustomed to the Anno Domini moniker, and I do hope I got my Latin right and it translates to “in the year of connectivity” or “the year of the connection.”

Here is some dates in the new date system:

• 2 million years BE - invention of language (probably)
• 5400 BE - invention of writing
• 1494 BE - fall of the Western Roman Empire
• 560 BE - battle of Grunwald (but now Poles and Germans play in the same team)
• 77 BE - New Zealand becomes the first self-governing country to give women the right to vote
• 25 BE - end of the World War II
• 1 BE - ARPANET becomes operational
• 9 AN - first commercial mobile network launched by NTT
• 19 AN - World Wide Web invented
• 37 AN - touchscreens are popularised
• 53 AN - AI likely able to pass the Turing Test
• 54 AN - your age if you were born on the epoch year. Happy birthday!