According to the New Age fanatics, it will be. Our bodily vibrations are increasing and we are becoming more spiritual beings. We are developing telepathic abilities and our dreams are becoming more prophetic. The aliens are spiritual and friendly beings too, and we will learn to live in harmony with them. Or so they tell us. Personally, I think this is all a load of crap. A millennium is simply a period of 1000 years. And although this may seem like a nice round number to associate with an important event, it is essentially a completely arbitrary time interval whose illusory significance is only the result of random events in history. The very fact that 2000 is a nice round number is the direct result of our ancestors’ decision to use base 10 as the standard counting system. Many mathematicians now believe that base 16 would have been more appropriate, but had they chosen base 16, then we would instead recognize the year 2000 as the somewhat less inspiring year 7D0. Would this year have evoked such prophecies?

And the new millennium begins in 2001 anyway. There was no year 0. According to the Anno Domini numbering system, the first millennium began in 1 AD and ended a thousand years later in the year 1001. Or maybe that was 1002, after a rumour suggests that there was also no year 666. Anyway, the new millennium will begin another 1000 years after this, in the year 2001 (or maybe that’s 2002). But regardless of when our current millennium is thought to have started, both the beginning and end of a millennium are totally arbitrary concepts. If you started counting exactly 1000 years ago from now, then the new millennium would be... 2 seconds ago. Hurrah! But then again, any moment in time can be considered both the end of one millennium and the start of another.

The only people to whom our adopted year numbering system should be of any relevance to are the Christians. After all, it was Christianity that got us counting years since the birth of Jesus in the first place. And the book of Revelation explicitly refers to the capture and release of Satan after a period of a thousand years:

Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth (Revelation 21:7)

Applying simple numerology to this verse gives us, 1000 x 2 = 2000. Could it be a coincidence that our next year is the year 2000? The speculations abound, but perhaps the most entertaining is that it is not a coincidence, but that it is a sign of the apocalypse to come, and Satan is behind the millennium bug. 

However, more recent evidence suggests that Jesus was born in the year 4 BC, and so if anything was going to happen 2000 years after his birth, it would have already happened 3 years ago (or 2 years ago if there was no year 666). It is for these reasons that I believe that if anything big does happen this coming New Year, then rather than being a natural disaster or divine intervention, it will be an artificial disaster of our own creation.

History teaches us that in the year 1000, there was a major outbreak of unfulfilled apocalyptic predictions. And I can only hope that the year 2000 will be no different. But there is reason for doubt… In those days it was only the educated and religious minority who had any awareness of the chronological date. But since then we have had the advent of modern technology, telecommunications, the media and the Internet, not to mention a huge increase in world population. And from these advancements has emerged the possibility for a simple delusion to turn itself into a worldwide disaster.

An example of such a delusion is the apocalyptic scenario surrounding the notorious Y2K millennium bug. I can confidently inform you that the actual bug is relatively harmless. Last summer, while I was working as a tester for an international software company, I learnt how simple it was to debug the date field in a standard computer program. Computer programmers can create brilliant programs out of mere ideas in their heads, and so to the experienced programmer it would be mere child’s play to debug a simple date field. Admittedly, there are some embedded chips that cannot be reprogrammed, but most of these don’t use dates anyway. The apocalyptic scenario in which every digital appliance will fail at the turn of midnight, is a profitable delusion designed to generate money by generating fear. Computer programmers will be making a fortune over the next few months for doing a job much easier than their everyday one. And this will provide the original programmers with a convenient retirement fund at the end of their careers.

But of more concern is the hysteria that that the millennium bug has generated. And for this, the media are partly responsible. Reporters feed on alarming or sensational stories, because they generate cash from the attention they generate. Serious topics are often distorted in the process, or ignored when a bland reality is discovered. When the news broke about the Soviet missile Y2K problems, reporters were quick to tell of error conditions leading to unwanted missile launches, which could possibly initiate a third world war. But a more sophisticated understanding of how missile systems work will tell you that a computer error cannot launch a missile without a human also pressing the red button.

Nevertheless, stories like this one have inspired gullible survivalists to relocate themselves, sell their assets, and stockpile food and water in preparation for the apocalypse to come. Ironically, they are proud of themselves for being in the minority smart enough to prepare for the end of the world. But we can be thankful that the gullibles are voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool. There will undoubtedly be a fe