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Year 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 ODonnell 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 doesnt fall until January 1, 2001. "The people who calculated the modern era didnt have the number zero in their numerical system," he says. "That didnt get in until the Arabs brought it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The chronologers who established our dating system counted the year of Christs birth as the year one." So the millennium may have already turned several years ago, or it wont happen for a another year yet. Either way, the notion of "the millennium" is just a convention, a useful contrivance thats essentially arbitrarylike saying "please" and "thank you," or choosing between a Rolex and Mickey Mouse. In the Vikrama Samvat era, an Indian dating system, the Wests millenniumthe one anticipated for the end of 1999falls in either 2056 or 2057, depending on which month of that calendars first year you base the calculation on. The Jewish calendar marks time from the worlds creation and gives the year as 5760. In China its 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 weve been and forward to where were going, its 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. ODonnell, 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. Penns 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 Computings 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 riders name is Data Matrix Meltdown. "Weve all got time enough to die" is the answer the rock group gave. |