The Rarest Dates in the Next 50 Years

Remember all that hype from back in the year 2000? I'm not talking about the y2k stuff, but just the fact that it was going to be the year 2000. Everyone was freaking out because for the first time in a thousand years, the date's fourth digit from the right changed. The 1 in the 1000's place became a 2. That digit would not change again for 1000 years.

...But then I got to thinking. What is the real significance? As with any counting system, the three things that determine the number are:

1. when you start counting (in this case sometime within half a dozen years of Jesus Christ being born)
2. how much you count by (one year, every year)
3. which base you count in (base 10)

I am going to talk about the third one. The year 2000 looks pretty sweet in base 10, but look to the right to see what that year was in other bases. Some of them are still interesting, such as 5, 7, and 10, but most of them are boring. Right now it is the year 2008, in base 10. In base 11, it is the year 1566. In base 12, it is the year 11B4. However...

I went ahead and made a list of the 18 most rare or special looking dates in different bases for the next 50 years and sorted them in chronological order. As always, click to enlarge.

Notice that I included a ranking for rareness.
Ranks 1-14 are all more significant than a century.
Ranks 1-11 are more significant than a bicentennial.
Ranks 1-3 are more significant than a millennium.
And rank number 1 is more significant than a bi-millennial.

So in the end we can see that the year 2000 was exciting, but we don't have to wait until the year 3000 for a similar celebration.