mch

a
144 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
puter would in his turn translate that March 21 into the 286th day
before the end of the year, the equivalent of 0.783 of one year,
and write our date down as — 6.783. Such an expression can be
fed into a computer, it can be compared to any other positive or
negative dates in Gregorian, Hebrew, or Moslem calendars, and
it can indicate the time with fantastic precision of a few seconds,
minutes, or hours, depending on the number of decimals used.
But such a system is neither easy or simple to use, nor very
exact. It would be much simpler to count in whole days and in
positive dates only, starting from an event very far in the past,
preferably some exceptional astronomical event that took place
at least 100,000 years ago, such as the ahgnment of all planets
at the same point on the ecliptic that must have taken place at
least once in the history of our solar system.
By pinpointing such a moment, we would establish a zero
point for counting time and also a zero point in longitude—
starting line for all planetary movements. The whole world
would then have a common chronological system enabling us to
make all time computations childishly simple and precise.
I have tried to establish such a starting point in time and longi-
seem
tude for my own use but encountered some obstacles that
to be at the present time impossible to overcome. The trouble is
that the French astronomers on one side and the Russian and
American astronomers on the other use diflferent values for the
same planetary revolutions and conjunctions, with considerable
dijfferences for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The French data
comes closest to the values obtained from the Constant of
Nineveh for planetary revolutions, but any attempt to calculate
the zero point in time and longitude from French data would be
rejected automatically by the Russian and American astronomers.
So I have given it up for the present, hoping that the time
might come when imiform astronomical tables will be introduced
globally.
The main problem is the impossibility to calculate precisely
the past conjunctions of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Here the Russian and American numbers are closer to
those of the Nineveh Constant than the French data. The
diflference shows up in the third and fourth place after the decimal
point only, but for calculations over very long periods of