Next Thousand Years‪.‬

This generation may be a little more sophisticated about the passing of a hundred years than were its forebears, just as reactions to the appearance of the once frightening comets have become almost nonchalant in our jaded age. Apart from its commercial appeal and the anticipation of computer glitches, there is not as much popular excitement over the dawn of a new century as there was a hundred years ago. Our insouciance may be suspended, however, if we remind ourselves that we are approaching the end not only of a century but also of a millennium. To look that far ahead calls for something beyond reminiscences of the past and extrapolations of the present. OUTSIDE the realm of science fiction, thinking in 1,000-year units is rarely useful. If such a perspective had been suggested a thousand years ago, the analyst would be projecting from a Europe that was just a few generations beyond Charlemagne, or from a Chinese Middle Kingdom that was a cultural mountain among world molehill civilizations, or from a Japan that was still in the shadow of Fujiwara Tadahara, awaiting the coming of the Minamoto. No intellectual artifice could have reached from the issues of the tenth century to those of the twentieth. Most of the novelties of the second Christian millennium were quantum jumps, not incremental changes from the past.