alt Hacker NewsOur dominant culture's "year zero" (aka the Common Era) is based on an estimated date of birth of a messiah of the currently-dominating religion. That calendar has also seen a major revision in October 1582.
Long before and after that religion became dominant, many people have used different calendar systems - and many still do. Rome was founded in 753 BCE, and the Western Roman Empire fell around 476 CE. That's over 1200 years.
It's more likely that another "year zero" event will happen in less than 8000 years. If the history survives that, we will probably just call the current era "Gregorian" or so.
It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just happened by accident that Western European-derived cultures were globally ascendant at that point in history, so that culture’s calendar became the de facto global standard. And if history turned out a bit differently, it easily could have been another calendar instead - e.g. the Islamic chronology (AH).
But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now.
I think the most likely way it might change would be (a) if humanity collapsed back to a premodern civilisation, and later recovered; or (b) some new culture/religion became globally dominant which demanded the calendar be changed.
Personally, I’m sceptical (a) is going to happen in the next few thousand years. I think the most likely scenarios are (i) technological modernity survives, (ii) humanity goes extinct completely, (iii) a more moderate collapse in which things get very messy but don’t go all the way back to the premodern era. I think all three are more likely than the kind of complete and extended collapse then eventual recovery which would be most likely to reboot the calendar into a new and different global standard.
I don’t think odds of (b) are high-it would require not just a new dominant culture, but also one which felt very strongly about wiping out all traces of the old calendar. Suppose 1000 years from now, 99% of humans are devout Muslims-I personally think that’s rather unlikely to happen, but anything is possible-would that trigger the current year numbering to be replaced by the Islamic one? I’m sceptical-all Muslim majority countries currently heavily use the Gregorian calendar for business use, computer systems, etc, and they don’t have a theological issue with that, so I’m sceptical they’d feel the need to change even if Islam became the globally dominant culture. And this isn’t a new thing in history-many historical Islamic empires continued the use of pre-Islamic calendars in parallel with the Islamic, especially since the Islamic calendar, being purely lunar, was less than ideal for agricultural use.