Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

Why is this guy posting absolute tosh when the world is about to end?

Chinese numbers the days of the week, starting from 1 for Monday, but with a special name for Sunday, it seems.

I don't speak, or read, Chinese, but translate.google.com confirms this.

I am often curious about how Chinese expresses something, so I ask translate.google.com to translate an expression into Chinese, then I change the direction of translation and insert newlines between the Chinese characters. It's not a very reliable way of investigating how Chinese works, of course, but it's a lot faster than trawling through wiktionary.org. If anyone knows of a better way of getting an answer to that sort of question, please reply here!

What do you mean you find it offensive?

Are you offended at the assertion that people doubt that Jesus existed at all? As one data point I can assure you that I personally doubt that Jesus existed at all.

Are you offended by people doubting that Jesus existed? If you are a Christian then you are a believer in one of the hundreds of religions from around the world. To be offended that someone doubts the existence of the figures in your holy book is an amazing egotistical statement. Should a follower of Zoroastrianism be offended by someone who doubts the existence of Ahura Mazda?

Are you offended by people doubting that Jesus existed because there are references to him from contemporary historical records? Well I feel that Christianity and other religions have a long record of shamelessly rewriting history and so I basically don't trust anything written down on this subject at all.

There's no reason to suppose that an intelligent alien race would find it convenient to count things in base that matches the number of "fingers" they have, if they even have such a thing.

Whales aren't far from being intelligent enough to form a technical civilization, but their body plan makes it unlikely that they'd use their "fingers" (or fins) to count, or to communicate with other whales.

Even if you gave an alien two human hands and knew that their counting system's base was derived from physical features of their "hands" it's not obvious that they'd come up with either base-5 or base-10 if they where starting from first principles.

We have 3 joints that make up our fingers, but the "base 10" assumes we only use one of those. It's not obvious that even a close relative to humans wouldn't come up with base-20 or base-30 just from counting using their fingers.

If you straighten or bend your wrist to add an "extra" finger for counting you're now counting in base-6 on one hand, base-12 on both. Do the same with your elbow joint and you're base-7 and base-14, respectively.

All measurements used to be a mess: lengths, weights, and so on. At the French revolution, they broke the status quo by introducing the metric system. Originally, the metric system also included a new calendar:

- One day has 10 hours.

- One hour is divided in units of 10, 100, 1000 (probably deci/centi/milli hours).

- One week has ten days.

- Each year starts at the fall equinox.

This calendar was used for 14 years. Then, Napoleon decided to bring back the previous calendar system as he reintroduced Catholicism as a state religion. Indeed the revolution calendar was purposely anti-christian: it moved the first year from the birth of JC to the year of the French revolution. Several religious events like Easter were hard to compute. Christmas was the day of the dog...

Anyway, we could have got a calendar system that makes sense, but History decided otherwise.