by Pete, October 2000

n the first century, the citizens of Jerusalem believed the end of time was at hand. The Romans surrounded the city, eventually destroying the temple and killing many of the city's inhabitants. Many Jews were convinced that life on earth could get no worse and that surely God would come down and save the chosen people from the hands of man. But God didn't come. And the Jews were not destroyed. Some survived--humiliated--but they survived. I'm sure some of them were disappointed that the end hadn't come.

	Pete contemplates the future with his third eye.

Fast forward over nineteen centuries. Last year, many believed that the end of time was upon us. We had become enslaved by technology and, as the clock turned from 1999 into 2000, we would be destroyed by the hubris of man, digitally choking on too many zeroes. Others felt that the year 2000 would be God's opportunity to call in his favors. But, unlike what happened to the Jews, the reality of Y2K was far more boring. Nothing happened. Imagine our disappointment.

For me, it was like watching people watching a car crash. I was fascinated less by the prospects of doom than by the spectacle of so many people asserting their prophecies about the turn of the century with the conviction of a chosen people.

What do I know?

Of course, I didn't know any better than anyone else what was actually going to happen, but I had the feeling that boredom would be a likely result on January 1st. Even so, Vince and I left the city for rural Sonoma County, as much to escape the hype and inflated party expectations as to escape the possibility of a city engulfed in flames, overrun by crazed bands of Y2K zombies.

As 1999 wound to an end, I read many different accounts of what some people believed would happen. I sought out the most extreme, the most fervent, the most negative. My favorites were the ones that saw some sort of religious significance in the calendar with a date of 1/1/00. I heard of a group of zealots from Texas who were flying fattened red bulls to Jerusalem to sacrifice to God. Prophecy foretold the He would destroy the Mosque on the Temple Mount, making it much easier to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed almost 2000 years earlier. A sacrifice would of course be called for. I read about the survivalists, stocking their secret backwater bunkers with provisions and enough fire power to kill a city full of zombies, unwittingly making their property the first target for anyone looking for a cache of scarce supplies. And I heard warnings from relatives in Illinois, who suspected that the changing of the century would surely cause California to finally take its well-deserved plunge into the Pacific.

I also read the skeptics and the mainstream press, mainly because they were pretty good at ferreting out the extremists and making the impending apocalypse sensational. Of course, many skeptics poked numerous holes in the numerological theories that attributed any particular significance to a year numbered 2000. Many argued that 2000 doesn't even represent a millennium but only one thousand nine hundred and ninety nine years, since the western calendar doesn't have a year "0." But, for the most part, the skeptics and the media admitted that even they didn't know what exactly was going to happen when the calendar turned and our computers were faced with a numerical conundrum. They mostly concluded that it was best to "Be Prepared," as the Boy Scouts say.1

Nine months later, I have looked back through my collection of millennialism articles and returned to the Y2K survival Web sites, many of which are still up, and I can't find any articles that say "Nothing even remotely interesting or newsworthy will happen, unless a slight disruption in the train schedule in the Philippines is of interest to you." Mostly, they say that minor disruptions are possible and the less-developed areas of the world may suffer more. But the truth was that the average person was more inconvenienced by unrelated power outages, labor strikes, and bad weather than they were by the computer bug that was supposed to end civilization as we know it. Nor did the Redeemer return after his two millennia rest.

What about global warming?

So it makes me think, what about all of the other doom-saying we hear about? What about global warming? Mass extinction? Pollution? Meteors? Over-population? Could the end result of these possibly calamitous events be as banal as the beginning of 21st century?

The truth is that for most of the potentially serious problems, the answer is yes. Humans, and the planet for that matter, have a way of being pretty darned resilient. Even the Jews have had triumphs after many of the terrible things that happened to them, including the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust. The earth, with all of its problems, including a meteor that killed the dinosaurs and the excessive use of ozone-depleting hair spray, is still pretty comfortable for us, allowing humans to increase in population and increase the amount of food we produce, though admittedly we are unable to distribute that food and accompanying wealth evenly and there is still great suffering and injustice in the world.

But every once in a while, I hear about something that triggers my imagination. Perhaps there is some mistake that we will make that will be so extreme and irreversible that we will finally do ourselves in and take the entire planet with us. Last year, I read about a controversial experiment to duplicate the conditions of the big bang, or maybe it was a mini black hole. No matter. Some scientists speculated that we couldn't possibly know the outcome of such an experiment, but if we did generate a small black hole, it could theoretically burrow its way to the center of the planet, then, atom by atom, literally suck the earth into it, from the inside out. By the time we knew what was happening, we'd be dashed into an infinite singularity--the Pope, the Great Wall of China, the Backstreet Boys--all erased from history, obliterated forever without a trace.

Perhaps that's why we can't find evidence of other civilizations in the universe. Maybe all advanced species like ourselves are driven to experiment with the extremes of our own world until one day, it's all over. Our prophecies of doom are self-fulfilled. The end of time will come, and God will have to pull our souls from the smoking hole that was our planet.

Or maybe not.