Andromeda timeline? (Read the details, dammit!)?

I have always wondered: What the hell time is Andromeda set in? I was pissed enough that they took it of the air a year a 3/4 ago but I'm even more pissed that I could never quite pinpoint a relative time for it. I always thought that it took place about, oh, 900 years in Earth's future (sice the advent of slipstream technology seems WAY past the warp drive). I never heard any exact dates either, and no reference as to where their current system of time measurement began. If you could, please, include that if you know it, and how to equivilate their system to ours?