Where will you be at the millennium...

Where will you be at the millennium and what’s going to happen then?

Everybody has heard of the YK2 problem, the havoc it will play with our records unless we lay out the manna to software companies, who’ll do up everything to three digits instead of two, and thus avert major information blues.

But isn’t it just typical that something as administrative as digits too few should dominate newsprint when we talk of the year 2000? It appears that the tyranny of petty science and pedestrian rationality is obscuring the woods for the trees.

What we should really be getting heated up about is the survival of the species for an entire thousand years and, closer to home, the triumphs of the twentieth century over its perverse side. But there’s precious little urge to celebrate, burdened as we are with paradoxes-procedure over substance, content over mood, sex over love.

Technology, that mutant ninja turtle begat by science and imagination has a poetic soul. In the 21st century, prosaic as most of mankind has become, it is technology that will lead us by the nose and help us realise the potentials of our better selves. Better computer controlled transport will set us free to roam. The Internet, WebTV, ubiquitous wireless telephony, and their interactive friendship, will keep us from getting lonely. Sperm banks will address our dynastic urges if we are squeamish about real life relationships and cloning new –born can be rapidly aged to the same stage as its deceased predecessor. Monstrous and Frankensteinish it may seem, but history tells us that, once invented, technology juggernauts on along its inexorable course. Legislation as we know it is being emasculated, not only by a weakening of the enforcing will but by the sheer advances in technology itself. It is technology that has now become aspirational, leaving mankind to purvey its saliences like a fruit seller, pointing out the luscious and the shiny in the hope of making a sale.

The 21st century beckons us towards a world of exploding choice. It will be a designer reality with everything from religion to the shape of our noses available on spec. The individualism that this will foster will change the nature of the trends because the largest number following something, will not necessarily make a stronger statement than those opting for marginal and fringe choices. Everyone will have the same guns and can choose where to fire at. It will be an age of technology as the great equaliser.

Disease will be headed off before it occurs by genetic manipulation. On the potentials and abilities front, men will design their sons into supermen with the characteristics they cherish deep in their psyches. Every form of narcissism will be rendered legitimate. With virtual reality, people will fashion their own virtual experiences, destroying the power of frustration forever.

I am sure some of us cling vainly to the idea of retribution to seize upon a moral plank that is supposedly immutable. Note that Time Travel and the consequent redesigning of cause and effect has once more engaged the attention of serious physicists. Retribution for violation of natural laws presumes that there is no going back. But what if that becomes possible, and going forward too?

And where is this NASA exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy leading towards? Will we not discover other dimensions and habitable planets in the 21st century? I will wager that if they exist, we will find them. After all, mankind found out that the world was round by the same exploratory process.

The laws of physics and chemistry, of biology and natural science, are changing almost as rapidly as the new humanities. The millennium may well be the threshold of a technological renaissance that will turn everything we hold dear today into a historical footnote, something which went before the new commandments replaced the old.

A thousand years of recorded history have nearly gone by, but it is as well to remember that this is still an applet in the sands of time that has run through the hourglass. The world has changed manifold since the ice started melting and the mountains first thrust into the sky. Civilisations have come and gone, many contributing lasting gifts to the future. But now, the acceleration is of a different order.

Only annihilation by nuclear apocalypse can set us back, and since there is an intricate balance of power in place, even that cannot be counted on to reduce the world as we know it, to a tangled skein of radioactive rubble. Still, only if that were to happen, or a pestilence descended, so horrendous and unstoppable, that it killed almost everyone, only then, would the 21st century resemble the centuries preceding it in some sense.

But to me there seems little chance of this Armageddon coming about. Mankind is headed for an era of enormous refinement, not by dint of individual labour, as in centuries past, but as a collective inheritance of the many, from the visionary work done by the few.

I would urge you to think about how you’ll bring in the year 2000. We are indeed privileged to be alive at this time and the millennium calls for the greatest celebration of your life.

(874 words)

By Gautam Mukerji

First published in The Pioneerwww.dailypioneer.com as “Towards a designer reality” on January 22nd, 1998 on the Edit page in the Second Opinion column