The Earth Epic Calendar has seven-day weeks because that is what just about the entire world uses. The week has been historically roughly one quarter of a lunar month, and where someone might see either the New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, or the Third Quarter of the Lunar Cycle.
People may opt to use the traditional names of the days of the week on the Earth Epic Calendar. I have also introduced names of the days of the week that are more secular. Few people know this, but the days Tuesday through Friday are named after Norse pagan gods, and Saturday is named after Saturn, a Greek pagan god. There is, of course, nothing wrong with that, but some people may prefer more secular or religion-neutral expressions of the days of the week. (The Quakers simply number the days of the week from one through seven.) Therefore the Earth Epic Calendar offers this as an option.
The days are named as follows:
- Sunday–Sunday
- Monday–Moonday
- Tuesday–Airday
- Wednesday–Waterday
- Thursday–Earthday
- Friday–Fireday
- Saturday–Starday
Must the week always be seven days?
Many calendar reformers combined quarters with a leap day or two not assigned to any day of the week in order to have a perpetual calendar in which the quarter starts on the same day of the week every quarter., every year. The months within quarters would have started on different days, but would still have a consistent pattern. In the proposed World Calendar proposed to the United Nations in the mid-20th century, January, April, July and October would always have started on a Sunday, February, May, August, and November would have always started on a Wednesday, and March, June, September and December would have always started on a Friday.
But the World Calendar reforms were never adopted in part due to objection from people in the Abrahamic Religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) who felt that with the requirement to honor the sabbath every seven days, the World Calendar would put them in the awkward position of having a different sabbath day of the week every year.
With the Abrahamic religions being so dominant in the world today, its probably more practical to simply accommodate their needs for an every seventh-day sabbath.
The future of the seven-day week
It will be up to future generations to decide whether to continue with a seven-day week. The seven-day week is not inherently critical to the structure of the Earth Epic Calendar.
Instead of seven day weeks, one option would be to divide the quarter into roughly nine units of ten days each. As such, it would not be necessary to even have named days of the week, as the last digit of the date would be sufficient to determine the day of the week. This was tried during the French Revolution, but was unpopular largely due to laborers only getting 1 1/2 days of rest out of 10. The current five day work week means that 28.5% of the week is set aside for rest (though, unfortunately, many workplaces require six and even seven days of work per week.) A strong argument could be made for having three or even four out of the ten days being set aside for rest and recreation. But this is for society to decide for itself in the future.
The future of the 24-hour day
It’s worth noting that while the average length of the year has been quite constant over most of Earth’s history, the length of days has changed significantly.
Roughly 250 million years (1 Eon) ago, the length of the day was about 23 hours and 500 million years ago (2 Eons), the length of the day was about 22 hours. With the orbit of the earth around the sun being about the same length of time, that means that a year consisted of about 380 days one eon ago and nearly 400 days two eons ago. Accordingly, the length of the year will be about 350 days one eon from now. A change of just one day per year changes our calendar, so truthfully, actual calendar dates more than a million years before or after the present time would not be accurate with today’s calendar. As such, there is no point in using the quarters, days or smaller units in this calendar for any date over a million years in the future or past. The date in such cases would be most accurately represented by decimal portions of the year (i.e. Eon 19, Genesis 57, Epoch 4, Year 64.525).
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