5. Numbering Mars’ Years
There is an old Martian saying — older than any of us, I suspect, and certainly older than me:
“The sky runs on truth. The calendar runs on agreement.”
Which is to say: stars may rise and fall in impartial obedience to gravity, but our reckoning of time is a fiction we must learn to believe in, together.
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The trouble with Mars was never that it needed a calendar. It had plenty — scientific ones, mission clocks, sol counters etched into flight manifests and rover dashboards. I've even worn a few. One, particularly unfashionable, ticked audibly every 61.65 Earth seconds. (It was a phase.)
No, the trouble was that eventually — inevitably — we stopped visiting and started staying.
And with permanence came the question: Where should the numbering begin?
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Some argued for a return to Mars Year One — the climatological convention traced back to Earth’s April 11th, 1955, when the northern hemisphere’s spring began. A respectable astronomical anchor, already embedded in datasets and simulation code. It was, admittedly, tidy.
Others insisted on the founding of the first base — the precise sol when humans made the leap from guest to resident. “A calendar,” they said, “should measure civilization, not equinoxes.” These folks tended to speak loudly, fondly of flags, and suspiciously often in capital letters.
Still others lobbied for earlier epochs: the launch of the first orbiter, the deployment of Viking 1, or the moment a human mind first saw Martian soil live via telemetry in 1609 (!). The philosophical camps flourished. I once attended a symposium where two historians debated, for five full hours, whether it counted as a “landing” if the payload bounced more than once.
I’m still recovering.
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In the end, as most great compromises are born — not through consensus, but through exhaustion — Year Zero was set to begin not with a bang, but with a bootprint. The sol on which a human first stepped onto Martian dust would henceforth mark the start of the Human Era — Year 0 HE.
It was elegant in its way: not the launch, not the landing, but the stepping out. That moment of transition from capsule to colony, from mission to memory. A civic milestone in an otherwise orbital age.
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This caused, as expected, no shortage of confusion.
Software had to be rewritten. Climate models cross-referenced. Archives relabeled. Old Mars Year counts had to be converted, adjusted, footnoted. We still see the occasional building cornerstone engraved with MY39 or MY40 — like fossils from a calendrical Cambrian.
I once spent six sols decoding a set of invoices that had been timestamped in both systems but with one offset by half a sol. The vendor was later revealed to be an Earth-based enthusiast who had never left orbit. Naturally.
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But the deeper problem was not software. It was psychological simultaneity.
Terrans and Martians no longer shared a common chronology.
Over time, the divergence was subtle but inescapable. Martian years stretch longer—roughly 687 Earth days (and 668 Mars sols). So a Martian child of 9 might have Terran cousins already preparing for university. A centennial here is 53 Earth years there. This calendrical drift became cultural drift, then existential.
I knew one woman — born on Sol 1 of Year 32 — who used to say, “My brother’s 72, but he’s only 40 in Martian.” She meant it as a joke. Then she meant it less so.
Age, anniversaries, even the passing of time itself began to feel… different. The rhythms were no longer synchronized. The Earth year galloped, the Martian year strolled. There was a certain dignity in that.
And yet, the choice of Year Zero — anchored in the first sol of human footfall — held fast. It gave us not only a shared beginning but a sense of sovereign chronology. It was the first time we numbered our years without asking Earth for permission.
We still marked the stars. But from then on, we also marked ourselves.
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The decision to number Martian years from the first human footfall was not merely calendrical — it was narrative.
It said: this is the story we’re telling now. A line in the regolith, drawn not by geology or orbital mechanics, but by presence. Before us, Before Human Era (BHE). After us, the Human Era (HE). Simple. Declarative. Almost… mythic.
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But as always, the truth of timekeeping is messier in the margins.
Take, for example, the BHE years. One might assume they were rarely used, being, well, pre-human. Not so. Scientists, archivists, and the more pedantic hobbyists of the Settlement Era quickly found them indispensable. Historical simulations, habitat designs, even early Martian cults made regular reference to them.
Indeed, some insisted that life on Mars began not with the footstep, but with the gaze—that moment, centuries earlier in 1609, when humans first looked upon the planet in earnest: imaging it, mapping it, dreaming of its touch. By that measure, the BHE epoch was not barren, but pregnant—with plans, probes, and premonitions.
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Naturally, this gave rise to revisionists. I knew one archivist who argued, with commendable sincerity, that Year Zero should have been set not at the landing but at the launch of the first “intentioned” mission — by which he meant a vehicle designed not merely to explore, but to prepare for us. He had a tattoo of MY31’s equinox data on his forearm. Lovely ligatures. Entirely wrong.
These arguments played out in everything from journal abstracts to ceramic plates. Early settlers inscribed date pairs on their belongings — HE and BHE side by side, like dual citizenships. For a time, wedding anniversaries were celebrated twice per cycle. Birthday cards required footnotes. (I still have one from a friend on Mars that reads: “Happy 33rd/17th!”)
The age gap — as it came to be known — persisted as both joke and discomfort. Children born on Mars aged slower, at least on paper. Nine Martian years into a child’s life and Earth was already calling them eighteen. This led to occasional diplomatic hiccups. One particularly bizarre extradition hearing hinged on whether a Martian adolescent could be tried as an Earth adult. The tribunal ruled in favor of Martian jurisprudence, on the grounds that “age must account for local gravity, both physical and civil.”
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Over time, most Martians came to adopt the HE system exclusively, letting BHE fade into quiet scholarly use. The exception, of course, being the religious sects and ceremonial guilds. (There is, I believe, a group on Tempe Terra who still mark time from the Viking 1 touchdown and celebrate the “First Descent” with dust cake and silent sunset.)
As for the Earth-based Mars Year system — MY1, MY2, and so forth — it continued to find use in climatology, orbit predictions, and certain nostalgic corners of the astrosciences. But within the domes and vaults of Mars herself, the HE calendar became the default. It was printed on receipts, carved into monuments, and etched into the sleep-cycle halos of newborns.
And yet — this is where I must admit a small fondness for the proleptic years.
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Before Year Zero, there is Year -1 HE. Before that, Year -2. A countdown, in reverse, like the deep breath before a dive. I have heard poets call these the “Gathering Years.” I have heard engineers call them “the runway.” Both are correct.
Calendars are not only tools, you see. They are acts of faith. They count not just what has passed, but what we choose to honor. When we number backwards toward a moment, we ennoble it. We say: this mattered.
And for all the arguments and adjustments — for all the haggling over Year Zero and the comedic misfires of age conversion — the Marian reckoning holds.
Because in the end, it gives us not only a measure of when we are, but who we are.
That’s the real magic of a calendar. Not that it divides time — but that it unites memory.
And if that isn’t worth a fresh epoch, I don’t know what is.
IMPORTANT NOTE
This is the Terran [Earth] edition of this codex. It uses Earth-duration years (365 days). Dates are given in both classical ‘Common Era’ [C.E.] (e.g. 2040) and ‘Human Era’ [H.E.], which counts Earth years from the first human arrival on Mars in year zero.
The Martian [Mars] edition of this codex uses the Marian calendar for dates and times. Mars-duration years (668–669 sols) and displays dates in the ‘Martian Era’ [M.E.], counting in Martian years (“Mears”) from the same starting event. In that edition, the year numbers are lower by a factor of roughly 1.88 compared to the H.E. years used here.