It sounds futuristic. But no, I am not relaunching as a science fiction writer, or setting the stage to write my predictions for long into the future. I am just showing a different way to indicate the current year. Simply placing a zero in front of the year encourages us to consider the present time in the context of tens of thousands of years, and not just in thousands of years. It stretches our field of vision forwards and nudges us to plan for the long-term. The addition of this leading zero was first proposed by the Long Now Foundation, an organisation whose vision is to encourage “imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years —a timespan we call the long now.” They suggest many of our failures to protect the natural world arise from our myopic understanding of time. We need to constantly remind ourselves that our actions can have very long-term consequences – positive or negative.
As we were approaching the year 02023, I made the resolution to include this leading zero whenever I write the date. Now that I have been doing this for just over a week, I can report it really does make a difference to my understanding of the concept of now. I am not sure it will be readily adopted in my workplace, and electronic forms only permit two or four digit dates, but, I am using this new denotion wherever possible and sensible. Go on, try it. See if it works for you.
