Preface: Why an Operator Ended Up Designing a Solar System Calendar

I am not an astronomer by profession. I am an operator.

I have spent most of my career inside organisations trying to make complicated systems work: planning cycles, operating cadences, organisational structures, reporting rhythms, decision rights, integration programmes and the thousand other pieces of machinery that allow groups of human beings to do difficult things together.

Calendars have been an occupational hazard.

After several decades of planning businesses around months containing 28, 29, 30 or 31 days, quarters that refuse to contain equivalent weeks and years whose weekdays move every January, I have occasionally wished I could have had five minutes with Julius Caesar.

It would have saved everybody a remarkable amount of time.

Quite literally.

The Gregorian calendar is, of course, one of civilisation's great pieces of infrastructure. Billions of people coordinate their lives through it every day, and replacing something so deeply embedded in law, culture, software, finance and ordinary habit would be an excellent way to create enormous disruption for remarkably little benefit.

But nobody starting with a blank sheet of paper would design it that way.

Businesses quietly acknowledge this all the time. Retailers use 4-4-5 calendars, finance teams count thirteen-week quarters, project organisations schedule in weeks and companies build operating rhythms around recurring periods that are easier to manage than the months inherited from Rome.

We have become very good at designing around the calendar.

That is usually easier than fixing it.

From operations to Mars

Most of my professional life has been spent thinking about systems of another kind.

I spent a decade at Google, including running its Global Business Strategy & Operations team and working as its first Chief of Staff, followed by four years as Chief Operating Officer of SoftBank International and later operating roles across startups and scale-ups. Much of that work involved taking organisations that had become complicated and asking how to make them coherent again.

That background is relevant to this book, although perhaps not in the obvious way.

I did not sit down one morning and decide that what the world urgently needed was a new calendar for Neptune. The path here began much more narrowly, with Mars.

For several years I had been writing The Mars Codex, a future-history series about the practical construction of a permanent human civilisation on Mars. The books are hard science fiction, but they focus heavily on the systems that would have to emerge once an expedition stopped being temporary and started becoming a society.

Eventually the calendar became impossible to ignore.

A permanent Martian civilisation would have its own day, seasons, orbital year and history. At some point it would surely want something more locally meaningful than simply pretending it still lived in London, California or Tokyo.

That question led me to develop the Marian Calendar, a separate custom calendar designed specifically for Mars.

And that, in turn, created a much bigger question.

Mars cannot be the whole answer

If humanity ever becomes genuinely multi-world, Mars will not exist in isolation.

There may eventually be settlements on Ceres and other asteroids, communities across the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, outposts farther into the Solar System and artificial habitats occupying useful orbits of their own.

Each place could create a perfectly sensible local calendar.

The problem is what happens when all those sensible calendars need to work together.

A person might be born on Mars, work on Ceres and later move to Titan. Companies may operate across several worlds, spacecraft will leave under one local calendar and arrive under another, while contracts, archives and historical records will still need to make sense across the wider civilisation.

That seemed to me a more interesting problem than designing another individual operating calendar.

So this book asks a different question:

If humanity eventually inhabits many worlds, what should those human operating calendars have in common?

Not what should they all be called.

Not whether every settlement should use the same dates.

And certainly not whether somebody on twenty-first-century Earth should decide the names of months for people living on Titan centuries from now.

Just what needs to be shared for many local calendars to remain part of one coherent system.

That is where Solarian begins.

Why this feels familiar

Although the setting is unusual, the type of question is not entirely unfamiliar to me.

Most operating problems eventually involve deciding what must be common and what can remain local; what needs a standard and what benefits from autonomy; what should be tightly controlled and what should simply have a clean interface to everything around it.

I think of that broader territory as operating architecture.

Most of my work on it concerns businesses and institutions on Earth.

This book simply points the same curiosity somewhere considerably farther away.

I have spent much of my career trying to make human systems easier to operate.

It was probably inevitable that sooner or later I would pick a fight with the calendar.

I accept that the Gregorian calendar is here to stay on Earth.

But I don’t accept that we cannot come up with a better operating-calendar solution for the planets, moons and asteroids humanity will, I am sure, one day settle — and the artificial habitats we will build among them.

Hence I give you my attempt at that:

The Solarian Calendar Protocol.

— Jonathan Bullock

More of my work on operating architecture, organisations and future systems can be found at iamJB.com.