What’s the Word: Where will we be in 2,000 years?
Now that the Christmas season is over, it’s time to start looking forward to the new year. Here we are, almost five years into the new millennium and pretty much none of the dire predictions the pundits and alarmists were bandying about back in 1999 have come to pass. No major breakdown of the world’s computer systems. No bank failures. No disintegration of world governments, unless maybe you consider Iraq, but we won’t go into that.
It’s amazing now to think about how paranoid people were and how they dreaded the coming of the year 2000. Now, in retrospect, all those irrational fears seem a bit lunatic, and hardly anyone even mentions them anymore.
But it was all the rage in 1999. Everyone seemed to believe the world was going to change dramatically just after midnight on Dec. 31 that year. Some believed it would change for the better, some believed for the worse. But of course, in the end, it was just another New Year’s Eve.
Still, it was amazing to think that 2000 years had passed since we started putting A.D. after the calendar date. And comparing the society and technology of the present day to the society and technology of that time, it’s almost unbelievable what the human race has achieved in those two millennia. A citizen in Christ’s day would no doubt run screaming if presented with a city like New York or Los Angeles and the endless stream of massed humanity, buildings and machines that make up the everyday life of those huge cities.
Many say the simplicity of that age was inherently better and that much of our society has become a scourge. But no one would deny there is bad and good among each of these eras. People live longer now, even with all the health problems the modern age has foisted upon us. We are more comfortable these days since we have so many devices to keep the environment at bay. We are warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and shielded from the elements to a degree that could not have even been imagined 2,000 years ago.
We have the benefit, and some might say the curse, of a communications and media system that literally shrinks the world and allows us to speak to and look upon someone on the other side of the globe in an instant. These images would probably have been considered magic, and maybe even witchcraft, when Christ walked the earth. It’s hard for a child of the 20th century to imagine how difficult it was to communicate in those times. You either sent a messenger by land, or made the trip yourself. Now we have communication devices that aren’t even tethered to the wall, that we can carry along with us and that will connect us almost anyone almost anywhere in the world.
The ability to physically travel has changed dramatically as well. A trek to the other side of the world that would have taken months and tremendous amounts of supplies and effort only a few hundred years ago takes only hours now.
Almost since the invention of the printing press scientists and scholars have been predicting what the future would bring. We still do that today. But the really amazing thing to me is to look back at where we began, and look at where we are now. I can’t help wondering if we advance at the same rate technologically as we have in the last 2000 years, where we will be 2000 years from now? It boggles the mind. Compare a modern supersonic jet airplane to a simple horse-drawn cart, and then imagine a vehicle as far advanced as that supersonic jet is to that cart, and imagine where we will be able to go.
Some people say it’s a small world now. Maybe then they will be saying it’s a small universe.
Charlie Johnson is news editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].