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clock photoYear 2000

"Does anybody really know what time it is?"

The lyrics are from a song by the rock band Chicago and ask a pertinent question on the eve of the millennium.

Classics Professor Jim O’Donnell has observed, "If grand millennial religious phenomena were in the cards for the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus, they would have happened during 1994 or 1997. We count ‘the Year 2000’ the way we do because a monk who lived 1,475 years ago made a mistake in his reckoning."

Historian Ed Peters points out that even if you assume the calendar correctly measures the passage of time from the Nativity, the third millennium doesn’t fall until January 1, 2001. "The people who calculated the modern era didn’t have the number zero in their numerical system," he says. "That didn’t get in until the Arabs brought it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The chronologers who established our dating system counted the year of Christ’s birth as the year one."

apocolypse horesman drawingSo the millennium may have already turned several years ago, or it won’t happen for a another year yet. Either way, the notion of "the millennium" is just a convention, a useful contrivance that’s essentially arbitrary–like saying "please" and "thank you," or choosing between a Rolex and Mickey Mouse. In the Vikrama Samvat era, an Indian dating system, the West’s millennium–the one anticipated for the end of 1999–falls in either 2056 or 2057, depending on which month of that calendar’s first year you base the calculation on. The Jewish calendar marks time from the world’s creation and gives the year as 5760. In China it’s 4697, the year of the rabbit.

Still, the convention provides an opportunity to reflect upon our place in the overall scheme of things. Looking backward at where we’ve been and forward to where we’re going, it’s an occasion to consider what time it really is.

On the cusp of the year 1000, scholars and church officials in Christian Europe were kept busy with prognostications related to signs believed to portend the end of time. "Is it now?" they asked with anguished hearts.

One millennium later, the technology plague threatened by the Y2K computer bug is arguably our gravest concern, thought by many to spell the end of civilization as we know it. O’Donnell, who is also vice provost for information systems and computing, has assured the Penn community that there is little chance of apocalyptic failure issuing from systems shutting down at the stroke of midnight. Penn’s resident technology guru believes that much of the millennial angst over the Y2K bug is driven by advertisers who use the media to scare and titillate consumers. At worst, he says, there may be a few glitches when some neglected computers are unable to tell the time as their internal clocks click over from 99 to 00.

The graphic from Penn Computing’s Year 2000 webpage (http://www.upenn.edu/computing/year2000/), similar to the one above, looks suspiciously like the doomsday clock that adorns the cover of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. For those of us who lived through the Cold War, that "alarm clock" has been ticking off the minutes till midnight since the atomic age burst upon us. In the information age, there is a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, and the rider’s name is Data Matrix Meltdown.

"We’ve all got time enough to die" is the answer the rock group gave.


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