Are You Ready?
Date: July 11th, 2001 @ 00:00
It’s 2001, and the clock is still ticking. Soon it’ll be 2002.
Looking back at fiction, it’s fairly interesting how far we’ve come, and how far we haven’t. Most people have access to cellphones smaller and more functional than the original “Star Trek” communicators, on the other hand, as the IBM commercial with Avery Brooks from last year asks, “Where are the flying cars?”
Skynet should have taken us out in the late 1990’s. HAL9000 was supposed to have come online in the early 1990’s, and we’re supposed to be excavating the moon. We’ve already partied like it’s 1999 ’cause it’s been 1999.
Who would have thought it? I’m sure there are those who figured we’d make it past all of that, I remember one hell of a lot of gloom and doom though.
How many religions were preaching the end of the world was coming, preaching Revelations? How many people were genuinely afraid that the heavens would open up, and that some sort of Judgement Day was nigh? The end of the millenium gave too much to that.
The computing industry was supposed to collapse with the “Y2K bug”. Power grids were to be shut down, trucking schedules for food were supposed to have been scrambled, and every water & waste treatment plant was supposed to reverse flow and eliminate drinkable water. Yet another “end of the world as we know it” scenario, all based on a few numbers rolling over to “000″. We can bring this subject up again in 2038 though.
The last I can think of (at 5:15am anyway), is the one that I believed would end it all: The Cold War. Time flies, doesn’t it? It wasn’t that long ago that the USA and USSR were always so close to ending everything. I don’t know how many others believed that that would never end, and the inevitable would happen. I did.
I didn’t expect to live this long, I didn’t expect the world to still be around after that. Yet we’re still here, still doing what we all do.
From the standpoint of humanity though, what do we look forward to now? There wasn’t anything to look forward to before, after all, the world was going to end. What did humanity look forward to a hundred years ago, before any of what has happened recently was even a dream?
Khruschev set a goal for his people. He failed, but he still set a goal. Kennedy set a goal for his people. They succeeded, but what came after that?
As a race, what is our next goal? What’s next? Is there anything to do? Is there anything to believe in? Is there anything to look forward to?
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