NEPP
One planet. One continuous date.
The Network Earth Position Protocol (NEPP) is an experimental calendar and synchronization protocol. It represents Earth's position within its annual orbit as one continuous real-valued date and exchanges that coordinate over a network.
Instead of expressing the present with a hierarchy of years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, an Earth Date is a single number:
The integer part is the Earth Year. The fractional part describes the orbital position within that year. An Earth Year begins at the March equinox and advances as the apparent solar longitude completes one revolution.
It is running now
Use NEPP Web to view Earth Date and your local Solar Phase directly in a browser—no app installation required. Your location remains on your device and is not sent to the NEPP server.
The public NEPP server is available at:
The Python reference client and the iPhone app can obtain the same Earth Date. The server, protocol implementation, specification, and iOS client are all published on GitHub.
Explore
- Calendar — the idea behind Earth Date
- Protocol — UDP packets and synchronization
- iPhone App — a NEPP client in your hand
Experimental
NEPP Version 1 is experimental. Do not use it as a civil-time source or for navigation, financial transactions, or safety-critical synchronization.