Looking Backwards on the Future

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Looking Backwards on the Future

By Ray Tabler

When I was a kid, the year 2000 was the future. Seemed like most every sci-fi story was set just about then. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Space 1999, even Prince’s song 1999. I doubt anyone paused to consider if all of this would come to pass by the year 2000. Y2K was just a convenient point in time, which resonated with the public. Sort of like a grade schooler dreaming about next summer, in the depths of February.

Beyond being a nice, round number, the expectation that something big would happen in 2000 probably grew out of millennial philosophies. In the medieval Christian church, there arose a belief that Christ would return and usher in the kingdom of God on earth. And 1000 years struck those pushing this theory as a decent interval between the first and second coming. So, 1000 AD was billed as the year. Then 1000 AD came and went with no discernible apocalypse. That must’ve been awkward.

No problem. Spin doctor isn’t the oldest profession in the world, but it’s been around a while. The story was put out that God had decided to give us another thousand years to get our s#*t together. But, come 2000 AD, no foolin’, Jesus was due for a visit. And watch out then. Maybe because of this, the crusades cranked up shortly thereafter. Not saying there’s a connection. But the timings interesting.

I don’t cast doubt on true believers. But I do find it odd that there’s a certain amount of uncertainty around the exact date of Jesus’s birth. Religious scholars examined the records, and set the blessed event as December 25^th, 0000. They might’ve been a few years off, though. Centuries of history will scatter and destroy records like that. It’s understandable. We are talking about a period when serious scholars estimated the beginning of the world as 6984 BC, essentially by counting “begats” in the Bible backwards.

Whether we should’ve been looking at 1995 or 2005 instead of 2000, it’s unclear why a thousand years emerged as the timetable for a reckoning. God probably operates on His own schedule, not ours. But there it is. Hence the term “millennial philosophy.”

Any number of thinkers and philosophers discarded the religious aspects of millennialism, and kept the ticking clock of an imminent societal transition. A deadline like that tends to motivate people in a way that an indeterminate date simply doesn’t. That’s why the year 2000 hovered over the second half of the 20^th century like a storm cloud.

Science fiction picked up on that, and set a lot of stories just past the turn of the century. Of course, as the 80s ran out and the 90s loomed, we sort of started to feel like watching the last few minutes of a TV show. How was the hero going to save the day before the top of the hour? Then, the most dreaded graphic in all of TV land appeared on the screen: TO BE CONTINUED. Cue the anguished screaming.

History, and the world, did not end at midnight on 12/31/99. (I know. The millennium didn’t officially begin until a year later. Just bear with me.) The equivalent of TO BE CONTINUED is all we saw. No apocalypse. No new age. Just same old stuff, different millennium. It was shocking in a comfortable way.

To be sure, there was the Y2K hysteria. A glitch was hyped to crash all computers and send us back to the stone age at the stroke of midnight. It didn’t happen. The glitch was real, but fixed well ahead of time. I suspect it was all a conspiracy by tech consultants to drum up some business.

The most noticeable effect on my life of the turn of the millennium was I suddenly understood why my grandparents said things like “the year nineteen hundred and two.” They were so used to saying “eighteen eighty-five” or eighteen ninety-two” that it was uncomfortable to hop right to the “nineteen” prefixes. It eased the transition to insert ‘hundred and” at least until the 1910s. Full disclosure, I was saying “two-thousand five” and “two-thousand thirteen” until “twenty fifteen. At the earliest”

Yet, here we are in 2025, and I still in the back of my head think of 2000 as the future. That mindset doesn’t survive the least bit of attention. But it lingers. Maybe because we still don’t have the jet packs, flying cars, robots, and Mars colonies promised to childhood me, come the year 2000.

Wait a minute! We do have jet packs, of a sort. And car-sized drones are being commercialized. AIs and robots are (arguably) here, much to our consternation. And Mars colonies are on the horizon, barring SpaceX’s bankruptcy. It’s all just 20 or 30 years behind schedule.

The second half of the 20^th century was a period of accelerated technological development, driven by the double-header World War II, and the subsequent Cold War. Between 1935 and 1955, the world went from biplanes and horse cavalry to jet fighters, hydrogen bombs, and ICBMs. We got used to that pace of development, and assumed it would continue. Don’t get me wrong. The risks of violent global conflicts can far outweigh the benefits of rapid progress. The human race was darned lucky to get out of the 20^th century with as few mushroom clouds sprouting as there were. I can accept several decades waiting for a flying car if it keeps the roentgen count down. That doesn’t mean we should stop. Far from it.

The future’s still waiting for us. Just not here by 2000, as previously advertised. My jetpack is on back order. But I check the doorstep each day for delivery. Please lodge your complaints with the management.

END.